3.17 Men, women, and animals
Some people say that Inform reinforces a gender binary, but nothing could be further from the truth.
- male/neuter
- male/not neuter
- female/neuter
- female/not neuter.
Inform reinforces a gender quaternity!
3.18 Articles and proper names
Finally, we can override these settings, if they still come out not as we intend, by explicitly changing the either/or properties “singular-named” (vs “plural-named”) and “proper-named” (vs “improper-named”).
I think this shouldn’t be a “finally”. Excluding mention of those properties makes this more complicated than necessary. It presents “this object-creation syntax results in this user-facing behavior” and I think it’d be simpler and clearer (as well as more accurate) to explain that those attributes result in the various behaviors, and these different kinds of assertions result in things starting out with these combinations of attributes.
3.19 Carrying Capacity
These restrictions only apply to the player (and other in-world characters): as the omnipotent creators, we are not restrained by them.
How little consistency-checking the World Model has outside the context of actions could stand to get more of a spotlight somewhere.
3.22 Food
the player can EAT them. This will usually only consume the foodstuff in question, effectively destroying it
This is the only place in the Standard Rules where something is notionally destroyed (also the only place where the Standard Rules move something off-stage).
3.23 Parts of Things
I’m not sure it’s worth it to even mention parts this soon. But if we are to mention them, it would be worth highlighting from the start that parts may exist, but by default there’s no indication that they do. This means there’s no way for the player to find out about them except one you probably don’t want: for things the player hasn’t heard to appear in disambiguation messages… but a scope discussion should come later.
3.24 Concealment
there are times when we cannot go along with Inform’s normal assumption that all of a person’s possessions are visible to everybody else
First we’ve heard of this.
(A rule which says neither “yes” nor “no” will decide yes, but it’s best to spell out exactly what’s wanted.)
This isn’t true of rules in general. A for persuasion rule which says neither “yes” nor “no” will decide yes, because deciding the concealed possessions of something is an activity, and that’s true of activities’ for rulebooks.
Concealment seems somewhat complicated to go into at this point. But certainly there should be a discussion somewhere that compares and contrasts scenery, undescribed, and concealed. (I think this is as much documentation as we ever get on described.)
3.25 The location of something
The “location of” a door is its front side
…until such time as the player visits the room that’s the back side of the door. Like the other side of a door, its location of result is subject to change. Once the player has visited the room on one side of a door, its location can be said to be whichever side the player visited most recently. Or, independent of what the player has visited, we can always say that the location of a door is always the side that’s not the other side of the door.
a backdrop has no location
Not even going to try. Take it away, @DrPeterBatesUK : Spatial Relations Addendum.
Objects which are not things at all, such as rooms and directions, also have no location.
location of does return a value for rooms: a room’s location is itself. For directions, location of really does return nothing.
The idea of indirect containment is useful enough to have a name: Inform calls it “enclosure”. A thing encloses whatever is a part of itself, or inside itself, or on top of itself, and it also encloses anything that they enclose.
…or that it wears, or that it carries. Or, for short, all the things it holds and the things they hold. “indirect containment” is a holdover from Inform 6. “indirect holding” would be a lot more meaningful. But the docs never mention the holding relation.
(The definition of the holder of phrase, when we get to it, does mention wearing and carrying but leaves out incorporation, which makes it easier to explain the first thing held by and next thing held after phrases which really do omit incorporation. These phrases have nothing to do with the holding relation per se and there’s no reason for them to be consistent with each other other than avoiding confusing authors.)
3.26 Direction
Representing Discworld directions seems a little abstruse for Chapter 3.
New directions must always be created in opposing pairs
There’s nothing enforcing that “must”. You can go ahead and define a singleton direction. Its opposite will be the default direction, i.e., north, the first one defined in the Standard Rules. If you think it’s silly to have two directions whose opposite is north, you could do:
Foo is a direction. The opposite of foo is foo.