§1.4. Information Only
One last preliminary: a handful of the examples do not show how to do anything at all, but are really sidebars of information. Those examples are gathered below, since they contribute nothing by way of recipes.
![]() | Start of Chapter 1: How to Use The Recipe Book |
![]() | Back to §1.3. Disenchantment Bay |
![]() | Onward to Chapter 2: Adaptive Prose: §2.1. Varying What Is Written |
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Backus-Naur form, or BNF, is a standard notation used by computer scientists to specify more or less precisely what the valid programs are for a given programming language. It tends to provide a good description for a language such as C or Pascal, where contextual rules are limited, but the authors of Inform are doubtful that it is such a good tool for a natural-language system. For those who are interested, though, the following gives a formal specification for Inform's rules.
The following examples show how Inform breaks down some typical rules using the system above:
(*) The colon dividing a rule preamble from its definition can be replaced by a comma only if the preamble begins with the words "Instead of", "Before", "After", "Every turn" or "When", and if the definition consists only of a single phrase. |
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Backus-Naur form, or BNF, is a standard notation used by computer scientists to specify more or less precisely what the valid programs are for a given programming language. It tends to provide a good description for a language such as C or Pascal, where contextual rules are limited, but the authors of Inform are doubtful that it is such a good tool for a natural-language system. For those who are interested, though, the following gives a formal specification for Inform's rules.
The following examples show how Inform breaks down some typical rules using the system above:
(*) The colon dividing a rule preamble from its definition can be replaced by a comma only if the preamble begins with the words "Instead of", "Before", "After", "Every turn" or "When", and if the definition consists only of a single phrase. |