Subject: Re: Parsing Chitchat

From: Albert Paul Jimenez III <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 06:31:23 -0700

on a related note, Pavel, why doesnt the room itself hear what is said inside of it?
I was going to implement an 'arena' that broadcasted everything it heard inside
of itself to another room, the Arena Stands, so folks could see what was going
on, but upon hacking the Arena's :tell, I found that it never broadcasted, and
when I looked at :announce_* I found that it didnt announce it to itself. Is
there a particular reason for this, or is it just something that whoever it was
forgot to think about?

--Zachary@LambdaMOO, Multiverse, and other places...

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From: [email-masked] (Erik Ostrom)
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 08:09:34 -0700

>on a related note, Pavel, why doesnt the room itself hear what is said inside

I'm not Pavel, but I'm sure he has other things to do, like HACK DISKBASING,
so I'll answer.

>I was going to implement an 'arena' that broadcasted everything it heard
>inside of itself to another room, the Arena Stands, so folks could see what
>was going on, but upon hacking the Arena's :tell, I found that it never
>broadcasted, and when I looked at :announce_* I found that it didnt announce
>it to itself. Is there a particular reason for this, or is it just something
>that whoever it was forgot to think about?

It would make :tell even more ambiguous than it already is.  This is
especially the case in portable (or interior) rooms.  :tell has to be used to
transmit sound from outside to inside.  If it were also used as a kind of
generic dumpster for stuff that happens inside, :tell would always have to be
checking callers() (or maybe just caller) to figure out whether to transmit or
not.

Put it another way: Is there a reason :announce* _should_ call this:tell?

WRT your room, the simple and correct way to do this would be to hack
:announce*.  This makes more sense than hacking :tell--after all, you're
trying to trap things that get announced.

--Erik/JF