inform 7 coding question! pleez HALP!

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hey all, why doesn’t this work?

[b]
Mantle Battle One begins eleven turns after Druid Ritual begins.

Druid Ritual ends when Mantle Battle One begins.[/b]

i get this error:

Problem. You wrote ‘Mantle Battle One begins eleven turns after Druid Ritual begins’ : but I can’t find a verb here that I know how to deal with, so I am ignoring this sentence altogether.

inform7

thanks,
Neil!!!

2

Here is some code which does what you want.

[code]Mantle Battle One is a scene. Druid Ritual is a scene.

Druid Ritual ends when time since Druid Ritual began is 11 minutes.
Mantle Battle One begins when Druid Ritual ends.[/code]
How did you come up with the “X turns after Y begins” syntax? I couldn’t find it anywhere in the manual, and it doesn’t seem to be legal. The legal syntax is “when time since Y began is X minutes” (manual 10.3).

3

hey, im a novice. its my first work. i guess i thought that was legal code. it sounds right, but it aint.

thanks a ton for the example of what should work!!!

4

That’s quite normal with Inform syntax. There are many, many ways of phrasing things that look sensible, but that either fail to compile or compile but produce unexpected results.

5

I guess that’s the downside of using a fairly large fragment of natural English for programming: it’s easy to think that the fragment is even larger, and it’s hard to remember the exact shape of it.

6

Yeah, as someone said – and I completely agree: Inform 7 code is not easier to write than Inform 6 code, but it is a lot easier to read.

7

Which is why I like it. Contrary to complaints from a couple vociferous individuals, I like I7 more and more. You only write code once, but you have to read it over and over.