Alternatives about hank HOT 6 CLOSED

I'm personally disinclined from hacking more syntax into hscript such as {&value1|value2|value3}. One of the reasons for that is I find the difference between &, !, ~, etc. very confusing in Ink to begin with, and I'd rather replace it with something instantly readable like {shuffle(...)} {onlyOnce(...)} that doesn't obfuscate the type of flow being invoked.

from hank.

After looking over the Ink tutorial again, I see that you're right--the sleek syntax for alternative sequences is pretty great. I think I'll refactor fillHExpressions() into a method fillBracketExpressions() which calls two separate functions depending on whether the bracket contents start with the symbol for an alternative sequence, or not, in which case it will be parsed as hscript like before. I'm planning to allow the single-character symbols Ink uses, and also versions like 'shuffle' for a shuffle, etc. if the author wants more readability.

from hank.

Closed by 088c22d. Let me know if there are any problems.

from hank.

I see your point, and I think that makes sense. Then we could just expose those functions in HScript without needing to change anything about the current implementation. That's a plus.

Still, there are a couple things I don't like about it:

• You have to put your strings inside quotes for those functions, which means having to do escapes and things like that if you've got quotes inside of the strings. ( not a huge deal )
• I don't think that would very well with nested alternatives. Obviously you can achieve the same effect in other ways, but you would have to write more Haxe which works against the average user that you want to be able to write hank.

Edit: Another issue is if you want to support redirects inside of alternatives. That wouldn't work either. The advantage of alternatives in Ink is that they contain actual Ink content that resolves just like any other line content.

I'm not against making the syntax more clear, but I'm not so sure that making it so that the only way to resolve alternatives is to use HScript is such a good idea. It makes it a little too programer-y and limits what you might be able to do without having to write Haxe.

from hank.

Two specifications from WritingWithInk.md that I predict will require careful attention:

Alternatives can be nested.

The Ratbear {&{wastes no time and |}swipes|scratches} {&at you|into your {&leg|arm|cheek}}.

Alternatives can include divert statements.

I {waited.|waited some more.|snoozed.|woke up and waited more.|gave up and left. -> leave_post_office}

from hank.

Turn this example into a testing example: https://github.com/inkle/ink/blob/master/Documentation/WritingWithInk.md#examples

from hank.