Max # of understand tokens

[severedhand]

Greetings revamped forum. Today my question is, does anyone know the maximum number of tokens – overall, and/or within a line – you can use with the ‘Understand “big/red/green”, “marble” as sphere of the ancients.’ construction?

I ask because I just want to make sure I’m not overstuffing with typos and alternates in general.

Second, I want to make sure I wouldn’t put so many alts between backslashes that the program ignores some of them – if that can actually happen.

By the way, I am aware of the implications of the difference between backslashing alts together (“big/red/green”) and putting them in separate blocks of inverted commas.

Thanks.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

I know I have hit a limit of “too much text between quotes” when writing some really long text variations, but you can just start another one I think.

Understand "1/2/3/4.../999" as a long list of numbers. 
Understand "1000/1001/1002..." as a long list of numbers.

Inform will let you know if you hit a limit…I’ve also hit prop table size and dictionary words, but with those you just declare a bigger limit than the default in your source text and it isn’t a huge deal. I’m not sure if or which of those apply to understand synonyms.

I bet someone knows specifics off the top of their head.

[severedhand]

Yeah, I had a feeling there might just a be fixed number you can declare as alts for one thing overall, or within one token, the same way the parser only pays attention to the first X characters of a word. And I had a hope someone might know that number

-Wade

[jrb]

This was discussed here (in some of the later comments).

Dealing with Fiddly Bits - Some Thoughts and Code

You’re playing along and you see an item with the following description: So, naturally, you try examining things on the clock: Yes, this example is excessive. I wrote it to make a point. These little nuisances bug me. What do you mean I can’t see any such thing? You just told me it was there! To fix the nuisance messages, an author might choose an obvious solution and create objects for all of those things and make them parts of the clock. However, in a large body of work, doing so may lead…

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Note that the limit of 32767 synonyms is for an object; I’m not sure if special parsing tokens have the same limit.

[severedhand]

Thanks jrb. Certainly, the topic you linked shows that

• you can stack a ton of alts in one token (a la Hanon’s example in the topic)
• you can stick 300 synonyms on an object in a Glulx game and it’s still OK (as per your example in that topic)
• or that there’s possibly no limit if 300 isn’t enough (as per your further investigation.)

This is all far more than I’ll be using. So I’m satisfied. Thanks all.

-Wade