16.10. Commands consisting only of nouns

| Chapter 16: Understanding |

| 16.10. Commands consisting only of nouns

In every example so far, and in almost all practical cases, the first word in a command which results in an action will be something fixed: a verb, in fact. When we write

> Understand "photograph [something]" as photographing.

we are saying that the first word of such a command will always be "photograph". Occasionally, though, we would like to understand a noun as a command, perhaps in a situation where the command is obvious. If we say:

> Understand "[something]" as examining.

then the command "examine" will be implicit when the player types a bare noun:

> A red box and a blue ball are here.
> > BALL
> The blue ball is plaited from many small leather patches.

so that the command "ball" has resulted in the action "examining the blue ball".

This is a feature which should be used sparingly, since it could easily lead to confusion if not carefully explained to the player. By default, it is not used at all.

It also has what may be a serious limitation: verbless commands like this work only when typed by the player as actions to follow - they do not work as instructions for other people. So for instance SVEN, BALL would not ask Sven to try examining the ball - instead it would generate the action "answering ball to Sven". (This is because the Inform parser decides whether PERSON, SOME TEXT is a request or just conversation by looking at the first word after the comma to see if it's a command.)

295
| Example Misadventure A going by name command which does respect movement rules, and accepts names of rooms as commands. |
RB

296
| Example Safari Guide The same functionality, but making the player continue to move until he reaches his destination or a barrier, handling all openable doors on the way. |
RB

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