[MUD-Dev] Re: lockless system - foolproof?

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <199809011749.KAA04222 at under.engr.sgi.com>
             J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> writes:
>
>This assumes that the propagation of shouts across the land is assumed 
>to be instantaneous.  Is that really an automatic assumption?  

It certainly is for me, and probably for anyone with any experience
playing on LPs, MUSHes, MOOs, or Dikus.  Umm, I think that's over
90% of the non-commercial MUDding playerbase.

The neophyte logging on to a MUD with no prior experience will
probably not make that assumption immediately, but I'd expect it
to be assumed pretty quickly, if you give people command feedback
and prompts; in traditional systems (like DOS) you don't get the
command prompt back until the command has finished executing in
entirety, and multitasking is hidden and the user is told to
think of the computer doing only one thing at a time (because
the general consensus seems to be that a user cannot grok
concurrency).

So I'd posit that even if it's not an automatic assumption,
it's one that will happen often enough to warrant worrying about.
(One interesting way to document a non-instantaneous propogation
would be to make something like the speed of sound real... and
then make a quest about finding out how fast sound travels.)

- Alex