Subject: 2 things. Simple things.

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 17:20:15 -0800

I'm from an experimental educational project at NC State University -- we're
using LambdaMOO to run a virtual english class.  I have two questions -- well,
three, actually:

   1.   We have personal notebooks for the students, that are dividing their
books up with property/topics (Dave Van Buren, thankyou).  In any case, we want
to be able to copy the contents of one property on one notebook  to another
notebook; permissions problems aside, the syntax for this is escaping me.  An
 example verb use...

           teach MyNotebook.dogs to YourNotebook

Would (theoretically,) add a property to YourNotebook called dogs and fill it
with what was in MyNotebook.dogs .   Is this feasable at all?  Is there some
nice propery copying utility I should know about?

   2.  Does anyone out there care to share some mud hooks for emacs' Pavel
Curtis' major mode?  We'd like the be able to exchange TeX files and graphics
files and were wondering about others that have done this or want to do this.

   3.  Is there any better place to be asking these decidedly newbie
questions?  I don't know where else to post.  Sorry, thanks.

(Mail me back, I don't want to abuse bandwidth any worse than I have.)

thanks
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Erik Ostrom)
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 17:50:44 -0800

>    1.  We have personal notebooks for the students, that are dividing
> their books up with property/topics (Dave Van Buren, thankyou).  In
> any case, we want to be able to copy the contents of one property on
> one notebook to another notebook; permissions problems aside, the
> syntax for this is escaping me.  An example verb use...

> Would (theoretically,) add a property to YourNotebook called dogs and
> fill it with what was in MyNotebook.dogs .  Is this feasable at all?
> Is there some nice propery copying utility I should know about?

This is fairly simple to write in MOO-code.  Some basic pointers,
since I don't know how proficient you are:

@verb generic_notebook:teach any to this
to add the verb itself.

Within the verb, you'll want to:
  (1) use $code_utils:parse_propref to split dobjstr into an "object"
      part and a "property" part.
  (2) use player.location:match_object(deststr) to match the "object"
      part to an object.
  (2) use add_property() to add the new property to the notebooks.
      This is a tricky part; for it to work, you have to either (a)
      make the "teach" verb wizardly or (b) make the notebooks all
      owned by the same person.  Come to think of it, how are you
      adding topics to the notebook now?
  (3) have a line like
        destination.(topic) = source.(topic);
      to actually copy the text.  You need to put the variable `topic'
      in parentheses to make it clear that you want to refer to the
      property named by the value of the variable `topic', rather than
      the property named "topic".
  (4) provide messages to the player to indicate when something's gone
      wrong.  For example, if :parse_propref returns a false value,
      you probably want to print out a usage message:
         player:tell("Usage:  teach <notebook>.<topic> to <other notebook>");
      And you may want to use
         $command_utils:object_match_failed(iobj, iobjstr);
      to print a message if iobj isn't a useful object.

Feel free to mail me more questions, if this doesn't help.

>    2.  Does anyone out there care to share some mud hooks for emacs'
> Pavel Curtis' major mode?  We'd like the be able to exchange TeX files
> and graphics files and were wondering about others that have done this
> or want to do this.

I'm currently working on a revision to mud.el that provides a
generalized protocol for MOO-to-client communications, like
local-editing and ftp-fetch requests.  I would hold off on any
specific variations on this theme until that's released.  (It
shouldn't be too long now, really.)

I need to revise the documentation I have of this; I can send it to
interested people when I finish the revision.

> questions?  I don't know where else to post.  Sorry, thanks.

MOO-Cows is a fine place for these questions.

> (Mail me back, I don't want to abuse bandwidth any worse than I have.)

I decided to send to the list because I thought the warning about
client stuff might be of general interest.

> [email-masked]

Erik/JF