I have an object that I want to call “the ocean” in my code in Inform 7. Whenever I run my game it represents it as “an ocean”. How can I fix this?
what did u first call it in your source code?
The ocean is an element in the imagination. The description is "Omitted stuff here." Understand "sea", "bay", "water" and "waves" as the ocean.“element” is a kind of thing, imagination is a hidden room.
hmm, i wonder if it has to do with your element thingy. im gonna have to say, let’s wait for the experts to touch this one. sorry, newbie here, just wanted to ask how it was originally stated because thats where i thought the game decides the article.
See 3.18 in the documentation. I think the phrasing you’re looking for is:
The indefinite article of the ocean is "the".Thanks so much. I wonder why I couldn’t find that with Google.
yeah, what he said!
Google’s not that great for Inform help, unfortunately. The forums are your best bet. It’s especially true with stuff like articles, since you can’t very well search the documentation for “the”!
Or alternatively:
An element called the ocean is in the imagination.Actually, you can, if you include the quotes 
I noticed some time ago that, at least in the Windows IDE, searching the documentation for a quoted phrase doesn’t work as (I) expected, but in this case it’s actually helpful.
-Kevin
On the Mac IDE at least, I think searching without quotes behaves as you expect searching with quotes to work, and searching with quotes (as you discovered) actually looks for quotes. If you want to find a bunch of non-consecutive words… I guess you have to try Googing the on-line documentation.
I have a google shortcut i use, where I put
site:intfiction.org
as the first search criteria…then you have the power of google but only results from intfiction.org, including the forums.