Hiya.
Every turn when examining things when there are unexamined visible things:
say "[one of]Y[or]While you're busy, y[at random]ou have yet to examine [the random visible unexamined thing that is not a person and that is not part of a person]."
All cool but i don’t want to be reminded every time i meet someone that i have yet to ogle their bits. so is there a way to restrict this to items, not people or animals or parts of either of those?
You might want to try an adjective simplify this, but I’m not sure if it will completely solve your problem.
[code]A thing can be unglimpsed.
To decide if (T - a thing) is unglimpsed:
if we have examined T:
decide no;
if T is not visible:
decide no;
if T is a person:
decide no;
if T is incorporated by a person:
decide no;
if T is worn by a person: [I assume you might not want what people are wearing involved]
decide no;
decide yes.
After looking:
repeat with item running through things in the location:
if item is unglimpsed:
say “You have yet to examine [the item].”[/code]
It works… but it mentions ALL the unglimpsed things and only when looking.
I’m trying to make it say ONE thing AT RANDOM , AFTER examining something.
Which i can’t make it do, for some darn reason. 
much appreciate the help though 
Try sticking a “rule succeeds” at the end after the say statement and it should stop after it finds one.
With Hanon’s definition of “unglimpsed,” I think you should be able to change “unexamined” to “unglimpsed” in your original rule.
I did try that, and it doesn’t do anything. at all. ever.
code is still in the game, never fires.
Every turn when examining something when there are unglimpsed things in the location:
say "[one of]Y[or]While you're busy, y[at random]ou have yet to examine [a random unglimpsed thing]."
Oh, wait a minute, there are two different "unglimsped"s in Hanon’s code which leads to bugs. “A thing can be unglimpsed” creates a property that can be set by hand with “Now foo is unglimpsed,” and “To decide if (T - a thing) is unglimpsed” creates a phrase that gets evaluated when you check “Foo is unglimpsed” but can’t be used as an adjective.
To set something that you can use as an adjective and that syncs up with Hanon’s definition, try setting a “Definition:” phrase like this:
[code]To decide if (T - a thing) is unglimpsed:
if we have examined T:
decide no;
if T is not visible:
decide no;
if T is a person:
decide no;
if T is incorporated by a person:
decide no;
if T is worn by a person: [I assume you might not want what people are wearing involved]
decide no;
decide yes.
Definition: A thing is prodworthy if it is unglimpsed.
Every turn when examining things when there are prodworthy visible things:
say “[one of]Y[or]While you’re busy, y[at random]ou have yet to examine [the random visible prodworthy thing that is not a person and that is not part of a person].”[/code]
Basically, “A thing can be foo” gives you a foo property that can be set by hand. “To decide whether (foo - a thing) rocks on (bar - a thing)” gives you a phrase that can only be checked with the exact syntax “foo rocks on bar.” “Definition: A thing is foo if” gives you an adjective that you can use in descriptions like this.
what the foo is foo?
It’s a metasyntactic variable used in examples. He’s using it to indicate the syntax you’d use to define a different adjective without specifying any adjective directly.
Yeah, sorry. Just replace “foo” with “______” everywhere and you’ll see what I mean.
… What. o.o
Anyone speak dutch? Because English seems to have bork.
Yeah, sorry, I made a declarable adjective…I didn’t realize I didn’t need to do that with a “to decide if foo is bar” construction.
The problem I had is it doesn’t seem like you can say “to decide if foo is bar” and then say “if something in the location is bar”. It won’t consider everything unless you explicitly tell it to repeat through a group of things. Maybe that’s not the case, but it would make sense.
I was trying to get rid of the awkward “random visible thing that is a person but is not an animal which has recently eaten a banana and loves the player” type construction.
i love you guys. but i don’t understand a work you’re saying.
oh and it’s FUBAR as in Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. right?
y’all need Talos. goodnight.
Metasyntactic - it’s not used in the programming language itself, but it’s used when talking about the language. Say I were teaching someone how to use the phrase “remove something from play”. Three of those words–‘remove’, ‘from’, and ‘play’–have to remain the same for the phrase to work. But one of them–‘something’–can be changed. So I might say it as “remove the foo from play”, with ‘foo’ standing in as a placeholder for whatever actual object they’re using. It stands out more from the syntax of the language (since in I7, ‘something’ can be a very important word e.g. within Understand lines).
Syntax - the rules for arranging words to create meaningful phrases.
Adjective - a word modifying a noun. In Inform most either-or properties are written as adjectives, so you can ask whether “the player can see an open container” and such.
The most common metasyntactic variables are “foo”, “bar”, “baz”, and “quux”, usually in that order. According to the Jargon File, FUBAR may be a back-derivation from foo+bar influenced by the German furchtbar. Foo itself may have come from the Mandarin word 福 (‘fú’) meaning ‘prosperity’ via the cartoonist Bill Holman, influenced by Yiddish ‘feh’. But nobody is really certain about this.
Yeah, because “to decide” phrases only accept the syntax you used to define them. Laying off the “foo” for Wes’s sake–I guess you could call him a Foo Fighter–a “to decide phrase” could be like this:
To decide whether (T - a thing) floats when submerged in saline solution:or
To decide whether (T - a thing) can sail to (D - a direction) when the sun is in (Z - a zodiacal sign):which aren’t going to turn into adjectives in any nice way. You have to call them with “If item floats when submerged in saline solution:” or “If item can sail to north when the sun is in Pisces:”. And
To decide whether (T - a thing) is noteworthy:is no different–“is noteworthy” there is part of a set phrase, it’s not “is” plus an adjective, so you can’t use “noteworthy” by itself.
That’s why I used the trick where you write your “To decide” phrase and then you do a Definition for an adjective that does nothing but call the phrase. If you do a Definition you can use what you get as a standalone adjective. I’m not sure if that’s the most elegant way to do it but it’s what I usually do.
Hm. I may be wrong on what you’re trying to achieve, but you could always use the alternative Definition style:
Definition: a thing is prodworthy:
if we have examined it, no;
if it is not visible, no;
if it is a person, no;
if it is incorporated by a person, no;
if it is worn by a person, no;
yes.
Oh, that’s the more elegant syntax.
[rant]
[/rant]now THIS i can understand. Thanks!
I had parser errors in my brain.