I was introducing someone to Inform and we were going through the manual a bit. He noticed something I glossed over. The manual says:
“A small limitation here is that probably only the first 9 letters of each word are read from the player’s command.”
The “probably” is a little odd. Either this is the case or it is not, isn’t it? My friend overlooked that being as he doesn’t have the preciseness of a programmer, but he didn’t overlook trying it out and he felt it was not a “small limitation.”
He did this:
The Cobble Crawl is a room.
A superhero is here.
A superheroine is here.
This displays as:
You can also see two here.
Notice that blank space in the output? Also if we type in “take superheroine” the superhero is in fact what gets taken. That certainly validates what the manual says. The question is why is this limitation on place? I hadn’t really run into this because I actually wasn’t coming up with too many names that were similiar enough in nine character incarnations such that the above conflict would happen.
So I guess I’m giving a “new person experience” report here, for what it’s worth. My friend got a bit discouraged until I showed him that it might not be a problem given how you name things. As a programmer, saying the system will “probably” act a certain way is just bad. Even if this nine character limit can be overridden, this would be a good point to say it. (The manual part I’m quoting is from 3.1.)