Subject: Ambiguity of Objects

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1992 14:08:01 -0800

Hello.  My brother and I are running into some problems with putting
verbs on objects when there is an ambiguity problem with the object.
For instance we are trying to make a pub where you can buy beer.  The
verb "drink" is on the beer object.  The problem comes when you have 2
beers in your posession and try to drink one.  Basically, because the
object "beer" is ambiguous, the parser won't recognize the "drink"
verb.  Is there any way around this?  The only thing we can think of
is to give each beer a unique name (which is ludicrous) or put a front
end command on the player for every verb s/he might use on an object
(this is only slightly less ludicrous).  Any ideas?  For this
particular problem, I suppose we COULD put "drink" on the player, but
this is going to happen quite frequently with other objects and verbs.
We would rather be able to put the verbs on the objects than have a
zillion nearly useless verbs on the players and rooms.
     Thanks for the help,
             Mike
P.S.  We don't want to change the parser.  We would like our code to
work on a generic MOO.

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From: Sean Christopher Simmons <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1992 14:26:43 -0800

This is a problem with the parser.  I have been looking into this
problem for a project of my own, and although I have not had time to
check it out, I've been told that you can solve the problem by changing
the definition of match_object.  I'm a little skeptical, as I thought
that would only fix matching for dobj and iobj at best, but you might
look at that.

===============================================================================
|     "jaa, na"                                                         
     | 
| Shin -- [email-masked]			Junior Undergrad CS           |
|      (Sean Simmons)                           Carnegie-Mellon University    |
===============================================================================

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From: Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1992 15:05:14 -0800

This problem has been addressed a little bit on LambdaMOO, with the
Matching Room, #3879, which defines a :huh2 verb (which gets called by
$room:huh).  The way it works is you say things like "drink my beer"
to disambiguate the beer in your inventory from the beer on the table,
and "get first beer" to pick up a beer (the first one in the room's
contents list in this case).  I don't think the Matching Room has been
included in the LambdaCore distribution.

yduJ on LambdaMOO        [email-masked]      'yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge'
    [ LambdaMOO is lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888 / 13.2.116.36 8888 ]
   Join the League for Programming Freedom, [email-masked]