I am (again) confused about line and paragraph breaks. Specifically, about using rules that will “say the description” of something. It seems this does not add the paragraph break before the next prompt.
A contrived example:
the garden is a room.
The statue is a thing in the garden. The description is "It's a fish of some sort. ";
inspecting is an action applying to one thing. Understand "inspect [something]" as inspecting.
instead of inspecting the statue:
say the description of the noun.
test me with "x statue / inspect statue";
When you test this, there is no paragraph break after the “inspect statue” output.
If you do
say "[the description of the noun][paragraph break]";
That seems to give me the result I want. Is this the “right” way to do it? Or am I missing something? I looked at section 5.8 which made be think I should be saying a [conditional paragraph break] but that does not seem to do anything here.
And are
say the description of the noun
and
say "[the description of the noun]"
equal with respect to paragraph breaks and stuff?
The standard examining rule from the standard rules:
Carry out examining (this is the standard examining rule):
if the noun provides the property description and the description of the noun is not "":
say "[the description of the noun][line break]";
now examine text printed is true.
So yeah, that’s the right way to do it (line break because you only want one extra line but paragraph break does the same thing). I have no explanation for why it acts that way. It might be useful if it added no line breaks at all, but adding just one seems like it’s always one too many or one too few.
I often find myself coding ridiculous cocktails of line breaks, paragraph breaks, and Run Paragraph On … all in token form, sometimes in the same string, to get the results I want
Can it be that the rule about full stops’ trigging a line break only holds for text quoted directly in a say-phrase, and not for text produced by text substitutions, text properties and text variables?
There is also a distinction between text generated by a phrase and text generated by a rulebook. Or a different rulebook. I’ve never been sure of the details on that one.
However, going back to your original example:
The garden is a room.
The statue is a thing in the garden. The description is "It's a fish of some sort.";
Inspecting is an action applying to one thing. Understand "inspect [something]" as inspecting.
Instead of inspecting the statue:
say the description of the noun.
This works correctly, with no additional line foofery! Your version was going wrong because you put a space after the period in the description. That suppresses the line break that normally applies at the end of period-terminated text.
EDIT-ADD: No it doesn’t. I’m an idiot. Ignore that last bit.
