[MUD-Dev] "From Kansas to Oz"

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199706120745.JAA25708 at regoc.srce.hr>, on 06/12/97 
   at 09:24 AM, silovic at srce.hr (Miroslav Silovic) said:

> [ChrisL:]

>> In <9706081638.84om at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA>, on 06/08/97 
>>    at 10:33 AM, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA (Chris Gray) said:

>> >Anyone else reading/read "From Kansas to Oz" in the April 1997 issue
>> >of the Communications of the ACM? Its about cooperative and virtual
>> >debugging in the latest LambdaMOO system. 
>> 
>> Yup.  I thought I mentioned it here?
>> 
>> What I thought particularly interesting was that by adding multiple
>> roots to the normally single-rooted MOO heirarchy they were able to
>> get infinite automatically generated parallel worlds with each world
>> able to access itself and its rightmost neighbor only (generations of
>> Oz).  There's something about that concept I find flat out
>> fascinating.  Don't really know what to do with it yet, tho I'm
>> determined I will do something.  Its too cute to ignore/

>Actually the only reason why it's an achievement in MOO is that they
>don't have multiple inheritance. 

The associated constraint is that MOO (and Cold?) is single rooted. 
The whole Oz and Kansas caper becomes much easier if your give (as I
recall they did), Kansas and Oz seperate roots, with each Oz
generation devolving a new root.

>Remember, with MI, you could easily
>just put core functionality on root, and then spawn multiple world
>parents from it, each with its own perm checking. I think I know
>exactly how I would do that in Cold (but its security scheme is
>different from MOO so it's much easier).

Quite.  Remove Cold's requirement for a single root and it becomes
almost trivial at the base level to implement.  Then the ugly stuff is
in the automatic kick-overs to Oz, the Oz<->Kansas
inter-relationships, and the Oz generations.

>On the other hand, the idea of multiple worlds, each looking at one
>below, /is/ cute. :)

Very.

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