Instead of generating a new numbered variable for every item in an array, what if you treated event handlers as objects in an array? (This approach won’t work for storing runtime values but is a pretty clean approach for fixed data like item prices and monster stats that are known at author time.) This example is for the player’s PulpScript for clarity of intention. You could add these event handlers to the game or individual rooms or tiles and use tell to call them.
on load do
totalItems = 3
end
on item1 do
itemName = "first item"
itemValue = "an apple"
end
on item2 do
itemName = "second item"
itemValue = "an orange"
end
on item3 do
itemName = "third and final item"
itemValue = "a banana"
end
on confirm do
i = 0
while i<totalItems do
i += 1
call "item{i}"
log "{i} {itemName}: {itemValue}"
end
end
I’m not sure how well this will scale (rememeber, PulpScript really isn’t designed for heavy data manipulation, syntactically or in terms of runtime optimizations) but it minimizes impact on the global variable name space since it’s just changing the value of a few predefined variables instead of generating a new variable for every possible value.