Let’s return to our Greet example that says hello to someone:

Greet ?who: Hello, ?who.

Now, if we run [Greet bill], it will print “Hello, bill.” That’s fine, except we’d kind of like it to capitalize Bill.  We can’t just say [Greet Bill], because within [ ] code, capitalized words are names of tasks, and Step will complain there’s no task named Bill.  So in the code, we use bill to refer to Bill the character.  But we’d like some way to tell the system to print bill as “Bill”.  Enter the Mention task.

When you tell the system to print the value of a variable by putting its name inside the text, like this:

Greet ?who: Hello, ?who.

That’s actually a shorthand for a call to a task called Mention.  What Step actually executes is:

Greet ?who: Hello, [Mention ?who].

Customizing Mention

If you don’t give the system a definition for Mention, it just treats it as a synonym for Write, a task that prints its parameter more or less verbatim.¹  But you can provide your own definition of Mention to customize its behavior.  For example, we can say:

Mention bill: Bill
Mention ?anythingElse: [Write ?anythingElse]

This says that when we Mention something, we should just Write it,² unless it happens to be bill, in which case it should capitalize it.  We can customize this however we like.  For example,

Mention bill: Bill
Mention diana: Diana Ratcliffe, titan of industry
Mention ?anythingElse: [Write ?anythingElse]

Now, if we run [Greet diana], it will say “Hello, Diana Ratcliffe, titan of industry.” In fact, any time we print diana, it will print “Diana Ratcliffe, titan of industry.” Of course, that might get annoying after a while.

Notes