Sometimes it is more sensible to describe numbers roughly than in exact terms. For instance, we might want to have our player perceive "many people" rather than "forty-two people" on entering a room. To achieve this, we might write our own "to say" phrase.

"Ballpark"

To say (count - a number) in round numbers:
    repeat through the Table of Numerical Approximation:
        if count is less than threshold entry:
            say "[approximation entry]";
            rule succeeds.

Phrases will be explained more thoroughly in a later chapter, but as we have already seen in the examples, we can make a "To say..." phrase that will allow us to create our own text substitutions. In this case, we are going to replace the specific number with a vaguer one chosen from a chart, so:

Table of Numerical Approximation

threshold	approximation
1	"no"
2	"one"
3	"a couple of"
6	"a few"
11	"some"
21	"many"
1000	"lots and lots of"

The idea here is that we will work our way through the table until we hit a line where the threshold number is higher than the number we want to express, and then print that output: so if we have less than one item, we'll print "no"; if we have more than none but less than two, we'll print "one"; if we have less than three, we'll print "a couple of"; if we have three, four, or five (but not six), we'll print "a few."

A room has a number called the population. The population of a room is usually 0. The description of a room is usually "You observe [population of the location in round numbers] [if population of the location is 1]person [otherwise]people [end if]here.".

The Stadium is a room. The Hot Dog Stand is west of the Stadium. The Women's Restroom is south of the Stadium.

The population of the Stadium is 500. The population of the Hot Dog Stand is 3. The population of the Restroom is 750.

Test me with "w / e / s".