Alternate Syntax

Some types of values allow for alternate specifications inside the .tell file.

Lists

Lists contain several values all of the same type. They are only allowed when a command specifically asks for them. ( re: strict typing. ) However, tell files support a shortcut so that single values can be specified when a list is required. Tapestry automatically transforms them into a list for you.

This appears most often with commands that require other commands. For instance, the do parameter of an if statement requires multiple entries:

- If:do:
  - true
  - # do two things:
    - Say: "hello"  # dash for the first thing
    - Say: "world"  # dash for the second thing

If you only had one thing to say, then you could specify that as a list of one entry:

- If:do:
  - true
  - # do one thing:
    - Say: "hello world"

Or, you could specify a single entry without the list:

- If:do:
  - true
  - Say: "hello world" # no sub list, do just one thing.

Arrays

Arrays show up only rarely. Like lists they are several values specified together, however they only support the so-called “primitive types”: quoted text, numbers, and boolean values. They must appear all together on the same line, surrounded by square brackets.

For example, assume there’s some command that takes a bunch of numbers. You could specify a list of those numbers like this:

MarsNeedsNumbers: 
  - 2
  - 5
  - 6

or, you could specify an array of those numbers like this:

MarsNeedsNumbers: [2, 5, 6]

Tapestry treats them the same.

More about Quoted Text

There are actually a couple different flavors of quoted text. Every piece of quoted text is either considered “interpreted” or “raw”; and can be either specified ‘inline’ or as a ‘heredoc.’

The specifics of the different string types can be found in the tell documentation

Json

There is a wholly different, alternative file format to .tell which uses the .if extension and contains json data. This is the format that Tapestry uses to save commands to the story database.

It’s more verbose than tell, and all of its plain-text sections must be manually wrapped in Declare:and Comment: commands… It is therefore unlikely anyone would want to author files using .if. But, it exists.

{
    "--": "This is an example comment for an example command.",
    "Say:": [
        "Hello, json."
    ]
}