Yeah, it looks difficult to me on the current release of Inform. What I’d ideally like to do is replace the default “I only understood you as far as” message when the command contains an apostrophe-s, so that it says “I only understood you as far as wanting to [action name] something of [random person owning or holding or incorporating the thing Inform wants to print here]'s.” But I don’t know if the relevant action name and thing are exposed to us here; the library message that prints this is “I only understood you as far as” and then the parser seems to be doing the rest.
I looked in Ron Newcomb’s Original Parser extension to try to figure out where the parser was getting this information from and it was even more incomprehensible than usual:
-- only understood as far as error:
issue the 28th response "I only understood you as far as wanting to ";
copy 32 elements from the player's saved understood command to the player's understood command;
now the understood command's current position is the second understood command's current position;
say "[recap of command from 0]";
issue the 56th response ".";
With some luck this might become a bit easier to deal with when the new Inform comes out (which I think will do away with the “library message” business).
It seems to me that it wouldn’t be good to always try to force there to be more than one assembly, because people can pick things up and put them down. Maybe the message given for this in Aaron Reed’s Neutral Library Messages would help.
Another concern might be that as written, ownership doesn’t override possession:
[code]Daily Planet is a room. Lois is a woman in Daily Planet. Lana is a woman in Daily Planet. A hat is a kind of thing. Understand “hat” as a hat. The fedora is a hat. Lois wears the fedora. The stetson is a hat. Lana owns the stetson. Lois carries the stetson.
Test me with “x lois’s hat”. [/code]
The game allows you to refer to the stetson as Lois’s hat, even though it’s really Lana’s hat and Lois is just carrying it. That seems not necessarily desirable. I think this fixes:
[code]Section 2 - Possession
Definition: A thing is unowned if no person owns it.
Understand “[something related by reversed possession] 's” as a thing when the item described is unowned.
Understand “[something related by reversed incorporation] 's” as a thing when the item described is unowned.
Understand “my” as a thing when the player is holding the item described and the item described is unowned. Understand “your” as a thing when the person asked is holding the item described and the item described is unowned.[/code]