[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Ben Greear]

There have been some very powerful parsers detailed here, at least
for my humble defintion of a parser.  They offer such nice things
as compound sentences, indirect objects and so on...

However, has anyone ever done any study or seen anything that proports
to explain what a common (for some value of common) user would like?
In other words, usability?

For instance, which of these would you chose to type:
get the sword from the second bag
get sword 2.bag
ge sw 2.bag

I don't mean this to be rehtorical(sp?).  I think one way to get this
information would be to set up a system that could parse several
different ways, explain this to players as desired, and then snoop
their actual input.  What do they really type?  Over time patterns
might emmerge.  It would also be interesting to snoop the commands
that they typed that, for whatever reason, your parser didn't like.

Being a unix hack, I'm prone to the shortest, un-fluffiest version
I can get, but I do see how that might annoy the hell out of newbies.

I haven't heard much one way or another about my parser, but there are
a lot of newbies who log on for 2 minutes and log off w/out saying
a word...maybe I should be counting those silent votes!!

Hrm, think I'll snoop the first 20 commands or so a newbie enters...might
prove informative...

--
Ben Greear (greear at cyberhighway.net)  http://www.primenet.com/~greear 
Author of ScryMUD:  mud.primenet.com 4444        (Released under GPL)
http://www.primenet.com/~greear/ScryMUD/scry.html


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