| Chapter 16: Understanding |

| 16.10. Understanding values

So far every "Understand" sentence has ended with "as" and a description of an action. But we can also use "Understand" to supply new ways to talk about things and even values. For instance, if we create:

> A brass lantern is in the Building.

then it can be called "brass", or "lantern", but not "lamp": Inform does not really know what these words mean, and has no grasp of synonyms. We can arrange for "lamp" to work as well like so:

> Understand "lamp" as the lantern.
> Understand "old lamp" as the lantern.

With care, we can do the same trick for entire kinds of thing at once. It is not ordinarily the case that a thing can be called by the name of its kind: if we put a woman called April into a room, then she can usually be called "April", but not "woman". (The exception is when we do not specify any name for her - in that case, Inform will give up and call her just "woman".) So there is not usually any form of words which can refer to anything of a given kind. If we should want this, we have to say so explicitly:

> Understand "machine" as a device.

Device is a kind, so now the word "machine" can be used to refer to any device: if there are two in the same place, the result might play out like so:

> >switch machine on
> Which do you mean, the bale twiner or the grain thresher?
> >twiner
> You watch absorbed as a perfect cube of hay is trussed up like a parcel.

Similarly, we might conceivably want to allow new ways to recognise values - in this case, a number:

> Understand "eleventy-one" as 111.

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| Example Palette An artist's workshop in which the canvas can be painted in any colour, and where painterly names for pigments ("cerulean") are accepted alongside everyday ones ("blue").

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