Mentioned/not mentioned in Standard Rules

Authoring Inform 7
1

I was just reading some tech stuff in a ‘speeding up Counterfeit Monkey’ topic from a few years ago (Testing Counterfeit Monkey on Iphone?).

It points out that in the standard rules, a default state for a thing is that it’s mentioned:

A thing can be mentioned or unmentioned. A thing is usually mentioned.

Then when the game starts up it does this:

This is the declare everything initially unmentioned rule:
	repeat with item running through things:
		now the item is not mentioned.

What’s the reason for doing things this way instead of making everything not mentioned by default?

-Wade

2

That rule runs at the beginning of play and at the beginning of each turn. And then an equivalent rule (the declare everything unmentioned rule) is run at the start of the looking action.

So the initial state of the mentioned flag is irrelevant, really. It’s scratch storage used within the looking action. There’s no reason in the standard library to clear it at the start of play; I suppose it’s done to ensure that no odd corner cases can arise even if a game uses it strangely.

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