What's the current say context called?

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’m experimenting with writing my own say atoms (like “[we]”), but I can’t find what I’m looking for so far.

Specifically, I’d like to know the current…whatever this is. The thing that is set when you say [regarding the noun]. This would allow me to do something like

say "[regarding the noun][he] does [newthing]";

and have newthing able to look up values in the noun (assuming that kind matches, etc.) – e.g.,

if the XXX is plural-named, ... otherwise, ...

Is that XXX called something like “the noun understood” or the context or the prior naming context or the prior understood context of contextness, or…?

Thanks,

  • Alex
2

It’s the “prior named object.” (I feel like this used to be in the documentation somewhere, but now it seems to be only in Example 251.)

3

Aha! Thanks.

4

Okay, that’s 90% of what I need, but it doesn’t look like it’s set when printing a description. I’d love to be able to use this feature like

Bob is a man. The description is "blah blah blah [newthing]".

Is there another name I can also capture for this sort of case?

5

In that case “item described” points to the thing whose description is being printed.

6

Thanks. Wish there was a list of these; maybe I’ll start one. Not sure what to call the list so that other people would find it, though.

Can you think of other contexts a say atom might come up that I should cover?

7

matt w, Emily says it would be worth filing that in Mantis under “doc issues”, if you could. So we can make the documentation better. :slight_smile:

8

Done, and I also encountered some stuff that confuses me about the prior named object. For instance, when you say a list, the prior named object appears to be the last thing in the list, so I’m not sure how Inform knows to print a plural verb.

9

In the English Language extension, this is written:

To decide if the prior naming context is plural: (- ((prior_named_list >= 2) || (prior_named_noun && prior_named_noun has pluralname)) -).
So there seems to be a “prior named list”, but only used in I6.