# Arguments -- what does "any" mean?

Kirrily Robert (skud@glasswings.com.au)
Mon, 11 Dec 1995 21:57:25 PST

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    I'm horribly confused by how arguments were parsed... I was under the
    impression that 'any' meant 'any or none', even where prepositions
    were meant.  But now I've come up across a problem that's got me
    stumped.

    What I have is a radio transceiver, which, for the sake of
    convenience, has aliases of whatever channels you're listening to...
    so for instance if you're listening to "chatter", "news" and "wizchat"
    the radio transceiver will have aliases like this:

    {"radio", "radio transceiver", "transceiver", "wizchat", "news",
    "chatter"}

    The radio has a verb on it called radio:"broadcast bc" which is
    intended to take a line of text and broadcast it to the channel like
    this:

    bc wizchat this is a test
    [WIZCHAT:Skud] this is a test

    Now, I had put this args on teh verb as "this none any" meaning that I
    didn't want it to have a preposition. But ti didn't work.  The old "I
    dont understand" message -- it didn't even parse it.

    So I told it teh args could be "this any any" and it still died.
    However, if I used

    bc wizchat is testing    or
    bc wizchat at testing    or
    bc wizchat into testing

    It would work!  It seemed to only accept actual prepositions, not  no
    preposition at all.

    Now, why is it that neither of these two arg types (this none any and
    this any any) seem to work?  Is there a way of getting it to work
    short of turning the radio into a feature object, or putting the verb
    somewhere on a player class?  Enquiring minds want to know!

    Skud