[MUD-Dev] Prepositions and parsing

[Nathan Yospe]

On Tue, 6 May 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

:What with the recent discussion of parsers and methods of parsing
:commands, and old entry from my to-do list popped up:

:  Support for prepositions such as "under", "on top of", "behind" etc.

:Anyone got any ideas for supporting/parsing a command like:

:  hide under the desk

This one seems pretty straightforward. "under" is one of the words my
parser always checks for, for this very reason... I define objects in such
a way that hiding under, behind, in, on (without much sucess), or more
ambiguously near, next to, and above are all useful concepts.

:or

:  put the rock under the rug behind the pillar

This, on the other hand, is rather more ambiguous, and calls for a check
in order of a) a rock in inventory or nearby in the open and a rug behind
a pillar, or b) a rock under a rug and a pillar in inventory (bad thing)
or nearby in the open. Behind and under both parse as relational keys. I
think I raised this question in the last couple weeks of the old list. I
used the example "Shoot the big yellow bird in the left eye." as a
breakdown of the above type of scenario. If you want any more of this, I
dedicated a good 4k of text to evaluating this sort of thing before
designing my parser.

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Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu