Address Issue #13: The "eat" command exhibits strange behavior

This commit is contained in:
Eric S. Raymond 2017-07-11 16:16:38 -04:00
parent 559b6435d1
commit f06e5b8fdb

View file

@ -52,6 +52,24 @@ The binary save file format is fragile, dependent on your machine word
size and endianness, and unlikely to survive through version bumps. There
is a version check.
The input parser was the first attempt *ever* at natural-language
parsing in a game and has some known deficiencies. While later text
adventures distinguished between transitive and intransitive verbs,
Adventure's grammar distinguishes only between motion and action
verbs. Motions are always immediate in their behavior, so both ACTION
MOTION and MOTION ACTION (and even MOTION NOUN and MOTION MOTION) are
invariably equivalent to MOTION (thus GO NORTH means NORTH and JUMP
DOWN means JUMP). Whereas, with actions and nouns, the parser collects
words until it's seen one of each, and then dispatches; if it reaches
the end of the command without seeing a noun, it'll dispatch an
"intransitive" action. This makes ACTION1 ACTION2 equivalent to
ACTION2 (thus TAKE INVENTORY means INVENTORY), and NOUN ACTION
equivalent to ACTION NOUN.
Thus you get anomalies like "eat building" interpreted as a command
to move to the building. These should not be reported as bugs; instead,
consider them historical curiosities.
== REPORTING BUGS ==
Report bugs to Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. The project page is
at http://catb.org/~esr/open-adventure