Chord / Flow & Progression / select with a strategy

select with a strategy

select <strategy> ignores the world and picks an arm by a rule about how often the block has fired. The arms are separated by or, exactly like the variants of a define phrase, because it is the same machinery: the five strategies are the phrase-algebra Choice selectors under author-facing names.

  on ringing it
    select cycling
      phrase chime-bright
        The chime rings a bright, clean note.
    or
      phrase chime-lower
        It answers itself a third lower.
    or
      phrase chime-clatter
        The tubes clatter together, all music gone.
    end select
  end on

The five strategies:

Strategy	Behavior
`cycling`	arms in order, wrapping back to the first forever
`stopping`	arms in order, then stays on the last
`randomly`	a fresh seeded random arm every firing
`sticky`	one seeded random arm, then that same arm forever
`first-time`	the first arm once, the second arm ever after

randomly and sticky draw from the same seeded, save-persistent stream as every other random effect in Chord, so a replay or a restored save reproduces the same choices (never Math.random). first-time is the "novelty then routine" shape, a drawer that is a discovery the first time and a shrug thereafter:

  on opening it
    select first-time
      phrase drawer-discovery
        The drawer shrieks open on a jumble of twine, labels, and one
        surprised spider.
    or
      phrase drawer-routine
        The drawer shrieks open. The spider has moved out.
    end select
  end on

The retired adverbs ordered and once are gone: ordered is now stopping, and there is no phrase-strategy once; its old job is covered by first-time and stopping. The clause modifier , once is a different construct at a different position and is untouched.