Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: IF, AI, and other two-letter acronyms
Message-ID: <neilg.733715311@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <733697218snx@hinrg.starconn.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1993 01:48:31 GMT
Lines: 30

mroberts@hinrg.starconn.com (Mike Roberts) writes:

>Note that plurals have been available since the earliest versions of TADS,
>Posessives can be simulated with adjectives, as long as the relationship
>is static (since you can't add and remove adjectives as objects move in and
>out of someone's inventory).

 Just a minor clarification concerning Jorn Barger's remark that I
have "hacked plurals" in my TADS game. I was talking about adding
support for plural nouns at the output stage, not the input stage.

 To clarify my clarification: TADS already lets you type commands that
use plural nouns "Take the books" and it will then apply the verb to
all the nouns that fit. However, most games don't distinguish between
singular items and plural items when it's referring to them. So you
get grammatically distasteful stuff like "The distant cliffs isn't
here."

 All I did was to add an "isPlural" flag to objects which should be
referred to in the plural. Then I wrote a few functions that print the
proper description ("don't" and "doesn't", "them" and "it", etc.) and
call them each time an object is described. A bit onerous, but fairly
straightforward, and so far it works well. (although I'd be quite
happy if a new version of TADS included format strings for plurals as
well as for dealing with different actors. But Mike probably doesn't
need more work, so I just added the feature myself. Luckily it *is*
the sort of thing that's easily added in TADS, as it's a hack that
doesn't rely on modifications to the parser.)

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
