Location error Message Headach

[Jeric]

Problem. You wrote ‘Holding Cell is a room’ , but that seems to contradict ‘Holding Cell is a room’ , as person and room are incompatible. (If person were a kind of room or vice versa there’d be no problem, but they aren’t.)

The actual line of code.

Holding Cell is a room. The description is "testing"

[Emerald (Emily Boegheim)]

This is Inform being computerishly stupid. You see, instead of reading it as “There is a room called Holding Cell”, Inform is reading it as “A room is holding something called Cell.” Which Inform thinks is nonsense, presumably because only people are allowed to “hold” things.

You can simply change it to:

There is a room called Holding Cell.

[Skinny_Mike]

@Jeric

The actual line of code.

Holding Cell is a room. The description is "testing"

Are you using the latest version of I7 (5z71)? While Emerald’s solution does work, this exact situation was dealt with in the latest version. From the release notes:

Another one that is arguably a change of design rather than a bug fix:
subject-verb inversion in assertions has been withdrawn for prepositions which are also participles… we don’t want to rule them out altogether. But we do want to prevent these sentences from being misread as inversions: “Holding Area is a room.”

When I try to compile the code example you give (even without the missing period), it works fine. If you have additional code and the line “Holding Cell is a room.” doesn’t compile correctly under 5z71, there might be something else wrong. You might want to post the complete code here or report this as a bug.

[Jeric]

Think I’m running an old version then (which is wierd since i downloaded it a couple weeks ago).

Anyway I just sidestepped the problem by renaming it something else, as to the missing period, it didn’t give any problems in the other rooms (removing that one line caused the proble mto go away, also put temp descriptions in each room till I get things fleshed out).