Sappho (SAF-foh) is the scripting language for Storytronics. It is the language you use in SWAT to fill out the forms for the Deikto words that the player sees. It's a very strange—and very powerful—scripting language, which is designed for writers and other storytelling professionals. It has many special features:

• Syntax errors (saying something that confuses the language) are impossible.
• Initialization errors (forgetting to set things up properly) are impossible.
• Point-and-click editing (no typos to cause big trouble)
• Argument prompts (when you need to fill in a blank, it tells you)
• Scripting is organized in a tree structure (easier on the eyes)
• Only legal Operators are made available at any given moment

Color-coded strong data typing:

Bright Red        Bounded or Unipolar Number

Dark Red          Regular Number

Blue                 Actor

Green              Verb

Black               Boolean

Magenta           Prop

Orange             Stage

Cyan                Event

Blue-Green      Trait

Purple              Quantifier

Gray                Comment

This means that you can't accidently mix apples and oranges (or Props and Actors) because it won't let you put a Prop into a slot meant for an Actor, or vice versa. And the colors make it easy to tell the apples from the oranges.

There are about 600 Operators available—most are simple.  There is no "flow control" (branching, looping, or subroutines) as is common in most programming languages. (But there are implicit looping Operators.)  Run-time errors generate Poison —a system that protects you from minor scripting mistakes.

This is an example of a Sappho script:

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  This tutorial by Storytron, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.