Preliminaries

• What This Module Does - An overview of the values module's role and abilities.

Chapter 1: Configuration and Control

• Values Module - Setting up the use of this module.

• Meaning Codes - The set of meaning codes used when Inform runs the excerpt parser.

Chapter 2: Specifications

An umbrella category for ways to describe data or its nature.

• Specifications - To create, manage and compare specifications.

• Rvalues - Specific values which can be stored or used at run-time.

• Lvalues - Storage locations into which rvalues can be put at run-time.

• Conditions - States of being which at any given point, at run-time, might be true or false.

• Descriptions - Descriptions such as "open door" or "number which is greater than 8" which may or may not be true of any given rvalue at run-time.

Chapter 3: Literals

Notations for explicit values such as 10:03 AM, six, 34 kg, and so on.

• Parsing Literals - To decide if an excerpt of text is a value referred to notationally rather than by name.

• Literal Patterns - To manage the possible notations with which literal values can be written.

• Literal Real Numbers - To parse real numbers written as decimal expansions, or in scientific or engineering notation.

• Times of Day - To make a built-in kind of value for times of day, such as "11:22 AM".

• Unicode Literals - To manage the names assigned to Unicode character values.

• Transcoding Text - To change the escape-character conventions used in text streams.

• Literal Lists - Parsing and vetting the kinds of literal lists written in braces.

Chapter 4: The S-Parser

Preform grammar to turn natural language text into specifications.

• Enter the S-Parser - The top-level nonterminals of the S-parser, which turns text into specifications.

• Constants and Descriptions - To parse noun phrases in constant contexts, which specify values either explicitly or by describing them more or less vaguely.

• Type Expressions and Values - To parse two forms of noun: a noun phrase in a sentence, and a description of what text can be written in a given situation.

• Verbal and Relative Clauses - To break down an excerpt into NP and VP-like clauses, perhaps with a primary verb (to make a sentence), perhaps only a relative clause (to make a more complex NP).

• Conditions and Phrases - To parse the text of To... phrases, say phrases and conditions.

• Invocation Lists - Invocation lists are lists of alternate readings of the same wording to invoke a phrase.

• Invocations - Invocations are to phrases what function calls are to functions, though they do not always compile that way.

• Parse Invocations - To register phrases with the excerpt parser, and to provide the excerpt parser with help in putting invocations together.

Chapter 5: Type Checking

The Dash typechecker decides whether text matches a given description.

• Dash - The part of Inform most nearly like a typechecker in a conventional compiler.