Person Asked - an odd one

Authoring Inform 7
1

OK, so I was doing a bit of code to help someone out on another thread and discovered something odd.

This code:

Library is a room.

Gorden is a person in the Library. 

Instead of asking somebody about something:
	say "[the person asked].";

results in :

Library
You can see Gorden here.

>ask gorden about library
yourself

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? And if it is a bug, is there another way of referring to the ‘person asked’?

Whereas this, the example from the docs :

Instead of asking somebody to try taking something, say "I don't think we ought to tempt [the person asked] into theft, surely?".

 >gorden, take ball
I don't think we ought to tempt Gorden into theft, surely?

is fine.

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2

The designations are a bit misleading, but for “asking somebody about something” it’s simply “the noun”, referring to the direct object of the action, similar to other actions. (Whereas the “something” can be referred to by “the topic understood”.)

In contrast to that, “the person asked” is only meant to refer to a person who is asked to do something, usually in the context of giving instructions to NPCs, as in your second example. (From your first example, where it results in “yourself”, it seems that this defaults to the player character if no NPC is addressed. I was not familiar with that aspect of the mechanism, either. Probably one could say that in that case, the player is the one giving instructions to the player character.)

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3

ooh…I did not know that!! Thanks! That could really do with being highlighted in the docs!!!

Thanks again.

Ade.