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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: [inform] three nouns and abusing AND
Message-ID: <G4pMxM.9tq@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 01:03:22 GMT
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 34
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:80746

I want to implement a verb that looks like this:

  FOO noun WITH scope=MyScope AND scope=MyScope

I forgot to put the DM on my laptop, but I've been hacking
around and reading through the parser source code, and my
conclusion is:

  1. There is no support for verbs with three noun phrases
  2. You can't fake 'AND' as a preposition anyway, because
     the parser is set up to err if an AND is detected following
     an object for a verb that doesn't have a multi case.
  3. There's no "scope=MyScope" notation for multiBLAH
  4. There's no reasonable way of introducing a new type
     of multi (a la multiheld) because these types are
     at least semi-hardcoded into the inform compiler (I
     don't think the compiler does anything special, just
     knows what token to put into the parsing tables for them)

Any suggestions? Is this doable in TADS?

The only thing I can think of is to strip out all uses
of "multiheld" from the existing grammar and repurpose
multiheld for my nefarious purposes, but I'm not looking
forward to that idea. (Didn't somebody complain at some
point that multiheld doesn't do the right thing anyway?)

Another would be to parse it myself, but I'm not totally
comfortable with that--I'd like to have pronouns behave
correctly, so I'd have to build on the existing parsing
routines, and I'm not sure that I still wouldn't get
burned by #2.

SeanB
