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3701: Re: [MUD-Dev] string parsing
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From: "Felix A. Croes" <felix@xs1.simplex.nl>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 1997 13:25:28 +0100 (MET)
Organization: Kanga.Nu
coder@ibm.net wrote:
>[...]
> >If the mud has such object relations as `next to', `on top of' etc, then
> >it makes sense to have syntax rules, and functions to give them meaning,
> >for all of them.
>
> My support for prepositions is currently, err, inelegant and flakey. I've
> not examined the area in depth, but when I do re-approach it I will want
> the system to be able to analyse the locations of multiple objects and
> determine the applicable prepositions which apply to their positions ("The
> ball and the light are above the table.") As such the base idea I have
> stashed is to operate off a tuple which defines the class of preposition
> (ie list of terms), and the spatial transformation which defines its
> scope. This (hopefully) reduces prepositions to a generic form which can
> be both parsed and back-constructed.
I think the difficulty in recognizing such object relations stems from
trying to do everything with a single positional system.
Proposed solution:
Start with a hierarchical container system at its most abstract. Let
each object have a "position" in its container. The interpretation of
the position is left to the container. The position can be a pair of
coordinates meaningful in the plane defined by the room, or a triplet
of coordinates in the 3-D space defined by the room, or
(angle, distance, speed) relative to the room, which is the planet in
whose gravitational field the object resides.
The position could then simply be a string like "inside", "beside" and
"above" to indicate the position relative to the container, without
imposing the same system on the rest of the mud.
Felix Croes