"Item" in Inform 7

Authoring Inform 7
1

Does the latest version of Inform 7 not understand the word “item”?

I wrote this code:

Carry out trading:
move the second noun to the player;
repeat with item running through visible not held talents;
now item is off-stage.

… and got this problem message:

In Part - Characters, Chapter - Trading with the Spirit Animals:

Problem. You wrote ‘repeat with item running through visible not held talents’ : but this is a phrase which I don’t recognise, possibly because it is one you meant to define but never got round to, or because the wording is wrong (see the Phrasebook section of the Index to check). Alternatively, it may be that the text immediately previous to this was a definition whose ending, normally a full stop, is missing?

Problem. You wrote ‘now item is off-stage’ : again, this is a phrase which I don’t recognise.

I was trying to match this phrase:

now (item is off-stage - a phrase)

But I didn’t recognise ‘item is off-stage’.

As I asked: does the latest version not know the word?

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2

You need a colon at the end of the “repeat with item running through…” line. Otherwise Inform thinks that you’re trying to execute “repeat with item running through visible not held talents” as a stand-alone command, which doesn’t work, because it only makes sense with some following code–the colon tells Inform that the next lines (properly indented) will be governed by the repeat loop.

“Item” by itself isn’t meaningful, by the way; here (and many other places you see it) it’s just a variable. You could write “Repeat with bimpmaster running though visible non-held talents: now bimpmaster is off-stage” and it would have the same effect, though it would be much sillier. (There are some set terms which include “item,” like “the item described.”)

3

That compiled. Thank you very much!