Could be a reference or a reminder to activate later when other things are taken care of.
I meant for posting. Nipping off just the opening tag makes it much quicker to reverse.
I think DFLang does all the work for you. You feed it some raw material, it runs something like the travesty generator code on it to mix things up, then it rewrites the language file for your new language. I did the word generator thing back in 40d, and dear god was it boring (I like typing too, but not stuff like that...). I think I got far enough to give DFLang something to chew on, which is something at least. I used a name generator that would take small scripts telling it which letters to use in which order, which gave the words some consistency.
Now what if you changed your mind and moved a caste to a different set of abilities? You could only move it up or down in the formula or make a new formula.
Haven't tested some of them since they're only good in Fortress Mode, but if one caste-level tag works the rest can be assumed to follow. I would still consider it unproven until I've tested, say, the [FLIER] tag in all its positions.
It's more like moving an ability to a different set of castes. The tags and their associated castes were written in out in a grid first so I could see how many 'passes' I'd need, and it turned out to be pretty much less than three. If I changed my mind it'd mean either rewriting the whole thing or adding some more lines after the section, simple as that. The intention was to get all the tags in the same section due to the length of the caste declarations, and it was just luck that I could stack the tags like that.
I was already doing the same rolling selection thing for the caste's bodies (it started with the [BODY:whatever] tag and went from there), which has caused some subtle problems regarding (at least) one caste having materials it shouldn't, or where it shouldn't. That's something I'll deal with once the creature's finished and I can start stripping things out of the raw until I've isolated the problem.
Did I do it the "usual" way then?
The usual way is to declare the castes and whatever information you deem to be integral to that caste, then to call one or more castes and work on them all at the same time. In your case there's no need for fooling around with selections, and all you'd be doing is shifting tags around instead of condensing them. The thing I can see that would save space is declaring a male caste and a female caste and then making the individual weights subcastes, but that's excessive considering your integral caste info comprises three lines. It wouldn't cause any problems since the subcaste declarations would happen early enough that they'd act like regular caste declarations so long as you avoided putting anything between [CASTE:MALE] and [USE_CASTE:MEDIUM_STALLION:MALE]. It would be more difficult for other people to read, since the full information for each caste would be scattered throughout the raw instead of being self-contained or in large chunks.
Late edit: missing /