Re: Line Counting

Cisco Lopez-Fresquet (briareos@mermaid.micro.umn.edu)
Tue, 23 Aug 1994 14:46:53 -0500 (CDT)

>
> > It seems to me that there already is a mechanism for character-authenticated
> > messages, namely the MESSAGE command, which also preserves the
> > anonymity of the faction, and player. Perhaps we could add a MESSAGE
> > ALL capability. And by the way, may I suggest an ENDMESSAGE command?
> > This will greatly reduce the number of errors in use of message it
> > seems to me, versus line counting.
>
> Line counting is tedious, but you know it's tedious, you know what
> you have to do, and you aren't likely to forget.
>
> Olympia I had a terminator keyword for POST/MESSAGE/etc. Players
> would forget it, use END/DONE/FI/whatever instead of whatever the
> terminator keyword really was. Switching to line-counting reduced
> errors.
>
> No, it's not lame programming. I did that on purpose.
>
> --
> Rich Skrenta <skrenta@pbm.com>
>

Why not give players the option? If they give a line number, print
that many. If the parser hits an ENDMESSAGE command, it stops before
the indicated number of lines. Lack of an indicated length on the MESSAGE
command would make the parser print until it hit an ENDMESSAGE.

That way those who would rather count can do that, while those of us who
would rather treat the whole system as a programming language can have
our ENDIF-type statements. As someone who loves to tweak his turn right
up until noon wendsday, I live in fear of changing a MESSAGE, and forgetting
to change the line count.

- Cisco.

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