[DGD] Desperately Wanted

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Erwin Harte wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 04:32:10PM -0500, bkennedyjr at mindspring.com wrote:
> > heh... you are likely to get what i've seen alot of times come
> > through here.  The assumption that you understand more than basic C
> > and a answer that assumes that.

> Considering that LPC is a C dialect, surely the assumption that you
> understand basic C, isn't such a strange one?

Surely no one will object if what goes around, comes around.  :)

Let's distinguish between "the assumption that you understand
basic C" and what the original poster wrote, "the assumption
that you understand -more- than basic C" (my emphasis).

I didn't even have an understanding of basic C when I started,
although I had had some classes in Pascal (that'll tell you
my age to within a couple years ;) and I pretty much picked
up C by piggybacking off LPC and Pascal.

That said, my case was a strange one, and yes, the assumption
that one knows basic C is reasonable. The assumption that one
knows more than that is, I think, unwarranted.

It is a sad truth that no one on this group (myself included,
with the exception of what I provide through my publically
available code) is interested in providing assistance with
DGD to newbies. We would do better to frankly admit that than
to make misleading attempts to evade the truth. If we would
frankly admit it, we might be in a better position to do
something about it, if we think that there would be some
general purpose to having a way for neophytes to get started
with DGD. (I'm not sure there would be any purpose to that,
at least not until a more usable mudlib, not excluding my
own, is created.)

That said, if anyone who has only a basic knowledge of C expects
that someone is going to explain parse_string() to them.... a
smart-ass comment is about the best you can hope for, because
it -might- induce them to realize how far they are in over
their heads.

If you are looking for a mud-in-a-box package to set up and
run, I'm very fond of the circa-1995 MudOS driver and the
TMI-2 mudlib.

Steve

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