§17.16. Understanding things by their relations
Sometimes it makes sense for the name of something to involve the names of other things to which it is related. For instance, if we say TAKE THE BOTTLE OF WINE, we mean that the bottle currently contains wine - if it were the very same bottle containing water, we would call it something else.
For names which must involve related names, a special form of token is provided. For instance, we could say:
A box is a kind of container. Understand "box of [something related by containment]" as a box.
The Toyshop is a room. The red box is a box in the Toyshop. Some crayons are in the red box.
and now TAKE BOX OF CRAYONS will work, because CRAYONS matches against "[something related by containment]" for the red box - or it does for as long as the crayons are there. We can have similar matches against relations of all kinds, but have to name the relation explicitly, using its one-word name. (See the examples at the end of this section for plenty of cases.)
We can also reverse the sense. If we write:
A box is a kind of container. Understand "box in [something related by reversed containment]" as a box.
The Toyshop is a room. The crate and the hammock are in the Toyshop. In the crate is a box. In the hammock is a box.
then TAKE THE BOX IN THE HAMMOCK will work: here, the relation goes the other way, because the box is being contained by the other-named item, rather than doing the containing.
![]() | Start of Chapter 17: Understanding |
![]() | Back to §17.15. Understanding things by their properties |
![]() | Onward to §17.17. Context: understanding when |
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We start by creating a camera and a photograph object. As usual when we want to have a kind of object that can be dispensed in bulk, we start off with a bunch of identical instances of the object out of play (in this case, kept in an out-of-play container called "film roll"); we can then move them into play and give them characteristics when they're needed. Each photograph can depict exactly one thing -- we're assuming that the player is not a landscape photographer here -- so we create a relation to indicate what is shown by each photograph. We'll then use that relation to determine how photographs are described, named, and parsed:
This allows the player to refer to any photograph by its subject: useful if we have a large number of them. Now we create an action to let the player use the camera and generate these photograph objects:
Now we use two activities from the Activities chapter to describe the photographs to the player more elegantly:
And finally we provide a brief scenario to give the player something to take pictures of:
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We start by creating a camera and a photograph object. As usual when we want to have a kind of object that can be dispensed in bulk, we start off with a bunch of identical instances of the object out of play (in this case, kept in an out-of-play container called "film roll"); we can then move them into play and give them characteristics when they're needed. Each photograph can depict exactly one thing -- we're assuming that the player is not a landscape photographer here -- so we create a relation to indicate what is shown by each photograph. We'll then use that relation to determine how photographs are described, named, and parsed:
This allows the player to refer to any photograph by its subject: useful if we have a large number of them. Now we create an action to let the player use the camera and generate these photograph objects:
Now we use two activities from the Activities chapter to describe the photographs to the player more elegantly:
And finally we provide a brief scenario to give the player something to take pictures of:
We start by creating a camera and a photograph object. As usual when we want to have a kind of object that can be dispensed in bulk, we start off with a bunch of identical instances of the object out of play (in this case, kept in an out-of-play container called "film roll"); we can then move them into play and give them characteristics when they're needed. Each photograph can depict exactly one thing -- we're assuming that the player is not a landscape photographer here -- so we create a relation to indicate what is shown by each photograph. We'll then use that relation to determine how photographs are described, named, and parsed:
This allows the player to refer to any photograph by its subject: useful if we have a large number of them. Now we create an action to let the player use the camera and generate these photograph objects:
Now we use two activities from the Activities chapter to describe the photographs to the player more elegantly:
And finally we provide a brief scenario to give the player something to take pictures of:
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