| Chapter 11: Phrases |

| 11.4. Conditions and questions

A variety of "conditions" have already appeared in this documentation. A condition is a phrase which describes a situation which might be true, or might be false, and examples might include:

> Mr Kite is in Bishopsgate
> the score is greater than 10
> Sherlock Holmes suspects a woman

These are all examples of sentences, formed by putting nouns either side of a verb, and clearly a wide range of conditions can be written this way. But there are also a few special conditions built into Inform which have a fixed wording, and test questions difficult to address with ordinary sentences. For instance, the condition

> in darkness

(e.g., "if in darkness...") tests whether the player is currently in the dark, and this is better than the more obvious-looking

> the player is in a dark room

since the player might have a torch, or be inside a cage which is itself in a dark room, and so on. Another example of a condition not easily written as a sentence is

> player consents

(e.g., "if the player consents...") which is unusual in doing something and not simply making a silent check: it waits for the player to type YES (or Y) or NO (or N) at the keyboard.

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| Example Proposal Asking the player a yes/no question which he must answer, and another which he may answer or not as he chooses.

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