# Using the Tools

We're almost ready to dive in and start writing our first game together, but before that, we'll just cover a few more preliminaries. Some of these will be repeated later, because they're important, and people generally need to be reminded more often than they need to be told.

Let's start with a list of important things to bear in mind when using the programming tools and files we've just set up.

1. When you write your source code, the compiler needs to be able to understand what you've written.
2. What a compiler does may look very impressive — turning your text into a working game — but in some respects compilers are very stupid pieces of software. In particular they are very literal-minded. If you don't type exactly what you mean in precisely the format the compiler expects, it won't understand you (or it may appear to understand you while in fact misunderstanding you).
3. In particular, even if what you meant would be blindingly obvious to any human reader, the compiler will insist on misunderstanding or not understanding it if you haven't said it in precisely the right way. This can be very annoying and frustrating when the compiler tells you about some missing semicolon or comma without making any attempt to correct the obvious mistake for itself, but that's compilers for you.
4. And yes, the TADS 3 compiler is very particular about things like commas and semicolons and other such punctuation marks. When you're typing in code from the samples given in subsequent chapters, be very sure to get such details exactly right, or the compiler won't understand you (and will probably reject your code with one or more complaints of syntax errors, which you'll have to fix before you can get your game to compile at all).
5. The TADS 3 compiler also distinguishes between upper and lower case letters. To TADS 3, heidi, HEIDI and Heidi are three completely different and unrelated identifiers, and if you type one of them when you mean another, the compiler won't understand you. So be very careful to copy the case of letters exactly when working through the chapters that follow.
6. The compiler isn't so fussy about text and punctuation that appears between quote marks (' and ', or " and ") since generally this is just text that's going to be displayed to the player, not commands that are meant to be meaningful to the compiler. But in some cases (e.g. when defining vocab properties and embedded expresssions) getting it exactly right can still be critical if you want things to work the way you expect, so you still get into the habit of being careful in your transcription.
7. In general the compiler isn't at all fussy about what you do with white space (spaces, tabs, newlines and the like). So far as the compiler is concerned the following two code samples are exactly equivalent:

       + nest: Thing 'bird\'s nest; carefully woven; moss twigs'
           "The nest is carefully woven of twigs and moss. "

           contType = In
           bulk = 1
       ;

   and:

       + nest: Thing 'bird\'s nest; carefully woven; moss twigs' "The nest is carefully woven of twigs and moss. "
           contType = In bulk = 1;

   It's just that the first way of doing it is much more readable to the human eye (and hence much less error-prone) than the second, so you should get into the habit of laying out your code the first way.

The other thing to note is that in addition to Workbench, or to your text editor and compiler, your other important tools are the various forms of documentation. In additition to this tutorial the important ones are:

1. The adv3Lite Library Manual
2. The TADS 3 System Manual
3. A few sections of the TADS 3 Technical Manual (though most of it is directed towards the adv3 library)
4. The adv3Lite library source code and the comments it contains (in the fullness of time it would be nice to have an adv3Lite version of the Library Reference Manual, but that doesn't exist yet).

In the chapters that follow they'll be pointers to further information you can find in all these sources. You certainly don't need to look them up straight away, but you will need to do so eventually.

adv3Lite Library Tutorial
Table of Contents | Tools of the Trade > Using the Tools
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