3.5. Kinds

| Chapter 3: Things |

| 3.5. Kinds

The following description runs to only 33 words, but makes a surprisingly intricate design. It not only places things within rooms, but also places them very specifically with respect to each other:

> "Midsummer Day"

> East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup.

Inform needs to identify the places and objects being described by the nouns here, and to guess what it can about them. For instance, the pistol can be picked up but not walked inside, whereas the Treehouse is the reverse. (This is obvious to someone who knows what these words mean, less obvious to a computer which does not, but the text contains sufficient clues.) Inform does this by sorting the various nouns into different categories, which are called "kinds". For instance:

> Garden, Gazebo, Treehouse - room
> billiards table - supporter
> cup - container
> starting pistol - thing
> East, up (implied by "above") - direction

(A container is something which can contain other things, and a supporter similarly.) For instance Inform knows that if one thing is in another, then the second thing is either a room or a container, and if one thing is on another, the second thing is a supporter. This worked nicely for the design above, but:

> In the Treehouse is a cardboard box.

results in the cardboard box being made only a "thing": because nothing has been put inside it, there is no reason for Inform - which does not know what a cardboard box looks like - to guess that it is a "container". So we need to add:

> The box is a container.

It is rather clumsy to have to write two sentences like this, so we would normally write this instead:

> In the Treehouse is a container called the cardboard box.

10
| Example First Name Basis Allowing the player to use different synonyms to refer to something. |
RB

11
| Example Midsummer Day A few sentences laying out a garden together with some things which might be found in it. |
RB

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