[DGD] Aliases & Stacked commands

[Par Winzell]

Bart van Leeuwen wrote:

> I think you really want something like this_player() because 'users' are
> not the only livigns that can use 'commands' on your average mud, which
> means to me that commands should never ever depend on this_user() since
> they will fail when used by a living thats not linked to any user.
> Of course there can be exceptions for security reasons, but those are
> cases where runnign such a command from an alias would not be a good idea
> either I believe.

I certainly agree that a living object should not depend on having a 
connected user for any of its in-world actions. In Skotos we separated 
commands and actions entirely -- commands belong to the text interface 
layer, actions are in the virtual world. Commands cause actions. NPC 
brains cause actions.

We deliberately rejected this_player(), though. As I recall, half of the 
  code in the old LPC driver is concerned with making sure this_player() 
has the right value at all times. It needs to be switched in and out 
constantly, depending on which function is being called where.

Instead, we simply pass along an explicit 'actor' variable.

As concerns this_user(), I ended up implementing a query_originator(), 
which is a version of this_user() that is persisted across call_outs. 
Originally this change was motivated by the fact that LPC is single 
threaded, and thus anything that touches the network has to use a 
callback approach to waiting for responses. Obviously, DGD's idea of 
this_user() does not survive that kind of 'wait', and so we wrote a 
bunch of infrastructure to bridge the gap. The main purpose was for 
runtime error reporting to continue arriving at the originating 
connection even after the callback.

Later, we've had to spread more and more processes out into 
callout-driven background processes. It's nice to have runtime error 
reporting continue to function there, too.

Zell
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