Chapter 17: Activities
17.2. How activities work

All activities start, continue for a while and then finish: however, no activity ever runs on for more than a single turn. Several activities can be going on at the same time. For instance, suppose the following is printed as part of the description of a grocery:

You can see a banana, an apple and a star-fruit here.

At the moment when Inform prints "apple", two activities are under way: "listing contents of the Grocery", and "printing the name of the apple". The sequence of events was in fact:

say "You can see "
start listing contents of the Grocery
    say "a "
    start printing the name of the banana
        say "banana"
    finish printing the name of the banana
    say ", an "
    start printing the name of the apple
        say "apple"
    finish printing the name of the apple
    say " and a "
    start printing the name of the star-fruit
        say "star-fruit"
    finish printing the name of the star-fruit
finish listing contents of the Grocery
say " here."

The golden rule is: if activity B starts during activity A, it must also finish during activity A.


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