Subject: spaces in player names

From: Lynx <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 10:29:44 -0700

What are the reasons (specific) that spaces are not allowed in Player Names?  I
would assume that it is because some verbs assume it is a single word, if so,
which verbs, and can they be fixed.  It just seems rather silly that names
would be limited to no spaces because some verbs were not written extensive
enough to handle them with spaces (if that is the case, I have yet to find a
verb which does this though...)

		-Brandon (Lynx aka Shade Pendragon-DarkurtheMOO)

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From: [email-masked] (Erik Ostrom)
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 10:51:39 -0700

What are the reasons (specific) that spaces are not allowed in Player
   Names?  I would assume that it is because some verbs assume it is a single
   word, if so, which verbs, and can they be fixed.  It just seems rather
   silly that names would be limited to no spaces because some verbs were not
   written extensive enough to handle them with spaces (if that is the case, I
   have yet to find a verb which does this though...)

$player:@who, $player:@send, $login:connect, I'm sure you could find others if
you looked.  But yes, these could be fixed.  One solution would be to have
@who continue to assume player names are single words, but require that any
player with a multi-word name also have its components as aliases; so, for
example, I could have the name "Joe Feedback" if and only if I also had the
aliases "Joe" and "Feedback".  This way the command "@send Joe Feedback" would
still do what's expected; it'd just match both of those names to me.  What I'd
try to avoid is the confusing situation where someone is named "Bob Jones" and
two other people have the aliases "Bob" and "Jones", so commands from players
expecting multi-word names to work do odd things.

One disadvantage here is that, given a simple-minded check on this stuff, only
one player could have "the" in eir name.  You could probably set up a list of
`trivial' words which (a) can't be aliases on their own, and (b) don't get
matched in commands.  (Maybe that one's obvious, since they can't be aliases,
I'm not sure).  So then "Puff the Magic Dragon" would only match on "Puff",
"Magic", and "Dragon".

Of course, you could also make your list-of-player-names parsing more
complicated.

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From: Clay Luther <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 11:57:41 -0700

> I'm not sure).  So then "Puff the Magic Dragon" would only match on "Puff",

The House of Wax and the GodNet both implement "fullnames" (though somewhat
differently), but fairly similar to the way you have outlined.  Since the
player.fullname is required to contain player.name, fullnames are guaranteed
to be unique.  Trivial and connecting words (a, an, the, et al) are not 
stored as aliases. 

Both HoW and GN use a :name() method on all objects rather than ever
referencing the .name property.  This caused some problems with the mail_agent
at first, but was easily fixed (The mail agent did a map_prop with name.  We
changed this to a map_verb with name and everything worked fine.)

-- 
Clay Luther                              [email-masked]
Software Engineer                        Vortech Data, Inc.
(214) 994-1377                           Fax (214) 994-1310
"They're not dead.  They're just metaphysically challenged." - Crow T. Robot