Hey Murph, (Can I call you that or is it annoying? Be honest.)
Anyway, I want to echo what Matt and Vince wrote. (What’s up, Weiner — I’m ba-ack.) To everyone reading this, I guarantee you that for every question you ask, there will be at least three other people right now and several others down the road who have or will have the same question but are too worried about looking foolish to ask it. Never be afraid to ask a question — unless you haven’t even read the docs and just started typing sentences into I7 thinking, “That’ll work.” (Trust me, people like that exist.)
My only problem with your post is that I’m not exactly sure what you want to do, or — more specifically — why (in terms of the work itself). Obviously, you want to be able to randomize the students, but is that to facilitate conversation, to hide the importance of a student who is key to a puzzle, to make the text less repetitive, etc.?
I’m going to guess from the code you provided that you’ve created a “student” kind of person. (There are other ways of accomplishing this, but a new kind of person is probably the best.) I’m also assuming from your code that these students have unique names. I’m a little confused about the whole “Student1 / Student2” thing. The randomization could be done easily with a list:
[code]Use serial comma. [Sorry, it’s a thing of mine.]
A student is a kind of person.
Peter, Paul, Mary, Tom, Dick, Harry, Jane, Joan, and Jill are students.
When play begins:
Repeat with S running through students:
now S is in a random room.
The Hallway is a room.
The Classroom is east of the Hallway.
The Lab is west of the Hallway.
The Library is north of the Hallway.
For listing nondescript items (this is the reorder student list rule):
let slist be the list of students in the location;
sort slist in random order;
say “[slist] [are] here, [if the number of entries in slist is 1]studying as usual.[else]arguing as usual.”
test me with “e/w/w/e/n/s/e”.[/code]
HTH