[MUD-Dev] common server design

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

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

>On Wed, 25 Jun 1997 19:25:38 PST8PDT,
>cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA (Chris Gray) wrote:

>>Here is one from me: (using pseudo-BNF type stuff)
>>
>>    Don't use		page <who> '=' '"' message
>>    Instead, use	page <who> <message>
>>	where <message> is the rest of the input line

>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.  

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.  

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. 

>>This isn't super user friendly, but after a bit of practice isn't bad -

>It's the user friendliness that I think we need to QUIT IGNORING.
>We've done it far too long. 

User friendly for A != user friendly for B.

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J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
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