Iron ChIF: Pilot Episode (Audience Commentary)

[jwalrus (Adam Biltcliffe)]

Yes, exactly.

No-one in the main thread has yet picked up on this:

@DeusIrae

Wrangling line breaks is the bane of many a parser-coder in Inform, and I believe it can be a headache in TADS too, but I’ve heard Dialog authors sing its praises on this score, so I’m trying to glean what I can about how it handles this vexed problem. I’m not seeing much different yet, with (par) seeming to indicate a standard paragraph break

Here’s the magic bit from the Dialog manual:

Several adjacent line breaks are merged into one, preventing accidental paragraph breaks. Likewise, several adjacent paragraph breaks are merged into one, along with any adjacent line breaks, preventing accidental runs of more than one blank line.

So you can put (line) anywhere you know that you need at least one newline, and if it ends up immediately followed by a (par) later, Dialog will correctly output two line breaks (producing a single blank line) rather than three.