# Arguments -- what does "any" mean?

Ian Macintosh (ian@iman.internet.co.nz)
Tue, 12 Dec 1995 00:07:11 PST

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    Hi Kirrily.

    On Mon, 11 Dec 1995, Kirrily Robert wrote:

    > 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.

    That impression was the correct one.

    > 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

    For this syntax the verb must either exist on you, the room you are in,
    or be activated by a :huh verb on the room you are in.

    > 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.

    That cannot parse.  The server uses the preposition to discover the dobjstr
    and the iobjstr.  With no preposition, there cannot be an iobjstr.  So if
    you have:

    any none none
        ^^^^

    The only reasonable value for the indirect object (iobj/iobjstr) is none.

    any none any, any none this, etc, are impossible.

    > 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.

    That is correct.  For example, bc wizchat Merry Christmas everyone.

    The parser takes the first word as the verb.  bc.  It then looks for a
    preposition, and not finding one, it takes dobjstr to be 'wizchat Merry
    Christmas everyone.'

    Naturally, it doesn't find an object called 'wizchat Merry Christmas
    everyone.', so the only places it searches for the verb (bc), is on the
    player in question, and the players current location.

    > 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!

    Either a feature object (actually a 'here:huh' verb), or on the player
    itself is the only solution here, unless you get sneaky in #0:do_command()

    Regards,

    	Ian.