[MUD-Dev] common server design

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <Pine.GSO.3.96.970803152545.27011J-100000 at dryslwyn>, on 08/03/97 
   at 11:27 AM, Martin Keegan <martin at cam.sri.com> said:

>On Tue, 1 Jul 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

>> In <33bc2b5e.28988475 at relay.mnsinc.com>, on 06/26/97 
>>    at 08:59 AM, caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias Darklock) said:

>> >cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA (Chris Gray) wrote:

>> >I made this exact same observation earlier in the discussion, along
>> >with the associated mention that this precludes the use of spaces in
>> >names. No response was ever made on the matter.
>> 
>> One approach is to make command parsing a question of simple and
>> uniform expression evaluation.  Make the rules simple and easy to
>> learn, and the rest should be almost automatic.  

>Another approach is to model it as closely as possible on natural
>English, to the extent that typing in

>prompt> how do i fight

>should bring up the appropriate help section.

I don't see that this is an exception to the concept of having user
commands follow a simple and uniform expression syntax.

>> The simplist approach is defining that an ID string is a single
>> continuous string of non-white space characters, or a string of any
>> characters enclosed by quotes.  Its ugly, but it works.  

>shoving quotes and equals signs into the syntax are anathema to me.

Agreed.  I'll admit exceptions however for human readability and
disambiguity.

>> More workable, but tougher to implement is automatic attempted parsing
>> of names as the command is parsed.  There are obvious ambiguity traps,
>> but it can be done.  The rule then becomes: an ID string is defined as
>> the shortest possible sequence of tokens in a given command which can
>> be used to uniquely identify a an indentity given the command's
>> context.  A lot more runtime work, you'll need ambiguity trapping, but
>> it also works and works predictably. 

>so long as you don't have too many addressable players and monsters
>in the game, the pruning and disambiguation is not all that hard.
>It's worth it though.

The fact that I don't have a global namespace really helps here.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
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