Another Rulebook Post (Inform 7)
I wrote last week about getting over the fear of rulebooks in Inform 7, specifically by not using the all-powerful INSTEAD to accomplish everything. After I read over the post, I remembered one of my specific hangups using rulebooks occurred because I was over-thinking the process: how does Inform know how my additional rules work in order? How does Inform know what order the rules should go in? Don't I need to write them very specifically so Inform and the compiler don't get confused? The short answer is not really. Beyond a few minor sequencing points when polishing the text output, Inform does not care where in the source text we write our rules. And the rulebooks consider every rule in them unless a rule explicitly tells it to stop (with an INSTEAD or "stop the action.") Imagine creating a shopping list. Unless we're extremely familiar with the grocery store layout, we'll write a list as items occur to us, possibly over a period of time or several ...