[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Ross Nicoll]

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Kylotan wrote:

> > So, I think discussion of simple, practical ways to handle a good
> > variety of input are quite relevant here.
> In particular, I am often amazed that the parsers in many muds are not
> even approaching the quality of those in the old Magnetic Scrolls and
> Infocom games. Now these were far from perfect, but they appeared to
> handle a lot more phrases and structures than many muds I have been on
> recently. This is even more notable when you consider that these games
> used to run on 64k machines (of which 16k was video memory on my
> particular model).
I've worked on text games in the Infocom format, and the parser is hardly
simple. About 280k of Inform code is used, just for the basic
parser, although this means that game files tend to be around 100-200k
these days. The games that ran in 64k were relatively cut down, from what
I've heard...

> So surely, there is some -simple- parser model that is
> not going to take much coding time, memory or resources, and yet would
> improve many muds significantly?
Wouldn't take much memory, but coding time would be very, very long
compared to a simple parser, and it would have a much higher CPU usage too
(although that may not make so much of a difference).

Maybe one day I'll write the basics of the parser into a C++ class, and
play with it...
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