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From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: Another TADS Question
Message-ID: <neilg.748900029@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <1993Sep23.235132.11782@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1993 19:47:09 GMT
Lines: 30

lyn6@ellis.uchicago.edu (caitrin  lynch) writes:

>I can't seem to get TADS to recognize when something is plural. For example,
>when I have written a plural decoration such as "cases", and the player
>attempts to take the cases, the games responds something like: the cases
>isn't important. How can I get the games to respond with the correct third
>person plural - aren't?

 As it comes from the box, TADS doesn't make a distinction between
items in the plural and singular. There is a "plural" attribute as
someone else has pointed out, but this is for player input -
specifying more than one of an item. It does *not* affect player
output.

 I didn't like this, either. So I made extensive changes to my adv.t
to incorporate plurals. What I ended up doing was rewriting each error
message to check the object in question for a plural flag. Then I
flagged each item that should be identified in the plural with a
boolean true value. (isPlural = true) I wrote a number of functions
that do this for me semi-automatically. All this messing about for
grammatical correctness!

 This is a lot of work. So the easiest thing is probably to rewrite
your game so there aren't any nouns that require plurals. For
instance, you could change the "thedesc" to read "that stuff" instead
of "the cases" if it's a mere decoration anyway. The error message
would then read "That stuff isn't important; leave it alone." or
whatever. A cop-out, but one that requires far less work!

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
