Problem changing the initial appearance of a character

[StephaneF]

Hello hello

Here is my code

When Night begins : repeat with P running through living prostitutes which are not in the location of the player begin ; move P to a random room ; now the initial appearance of P is "[P] is obviously waiting for a man." ; end repeat.

I assume it is simple enough to be understandable by everybody here

the problem is this one :

I was expecting that ‘P’ would be something to ‘say’, but it didn’t look like any form of ‘say’ that I know. So I tried to read ‘P’ as a value of some kind (because it’s legal to say values), but couldn’t make sense of it that way either.

I can’t understand why it’s impossible to print the name of the character currently treated by the program. And the most important : is there a solution ? many thanks …

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

now the initial appearance of P is "[item described] is obviously waiting for a man.";

[StephaneF]

One day I’ll finish reading the manual, I swear.

Thank you very very much

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

The problem with your first try is that the text “[P]…” is effectively a function that prints stuff, including the variable P. It’s going to outlive the local variable P, and Inform doesn’t support true closures, so the compiler can’t do this.

“The item described” is a global variable (the I6 variable “self”) which handily refers to the current object (in most contexts).