Zugg Software :: View topic - [2.02] Command Line - illegal token with "=" when first 'word' is an alias

Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 10:33 pm

Whenever you call an alias, CMUD is parsing the arguments just like it would parse arguments to a function call. This means that special characters need to be quoted, or put "" around literal string values. So you will need to do this:

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Yeah, I ended up using ~, but I never needed to in zMUD unless I was using ;.

Maybe there could be a preference to turn off all evaluation from the command line except for commands starting with a #? That should sort everything except @ and %, but everyone knows those are special characters and they are not used much in ordinary conversation. (An option to run off expansion too, would sort that out. I never use expansion or evaluation from the command line unless I am testing scripts.)

Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:49 am

zMUD used to have options like that (Expand Vars, Allow a=b assignment, etc). But I got rid of that to try and simplify things a bit (and since those options also had weird side effects sometimes). You can't really just look for commands that start with #, since a=b assignment is also really common on the command line. And with COM variable assignment, it gets even more complicated.

The "smart" command line is already supposed to be doing that kind of stuff. It's just that the = case isn't handled very well yet. Like I said, it *might* be something I can improve, but I wanted you to be aware of the limitations (and the fact that parenthesis *can't* be fixed and is more of a feature).

For example, I can't just do something quick and dirty like looking for a space. Because you can do COM assignments like this:

comvar.property(arg1, arg2) = value

If I just parsed on spaces, the the space after the comma would mess it up. So, I really do have to call the full CMUD parser to determine if a line is a valid script. And that means modifying the parser to handle the case of a = in the wrong place and treating it as a regular character instead of an assignment operator.

In any case, rather than add lots of confusing options and then having different people with different options trying to help each other, I'd rather keep it the same for everyone and just get people to better understand how the command line parsing works. It's also good practice for people to get used to this when using CMUD to learn how to program. For example, in Basic you can't just do:

call myproc arg1 = arg3

either. If you wanted to pass = as the second argument to the "myproc" procedure, you'd need to enclose the = in quotes there too. So it's just good practice to learn that programming languages are more strict with their syntax.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Yeah, but the command line is not just for programming - it's for sending commands to the MUD, which for me is mostly socialising at the moment. Wink

And even if I were really playing, the command line would still not be for programming. I use saved scripts for that and the command line only to test tiny things. How about a non-parsing mode, where aliases still work, but everything after that is treated verbatim? Er, and #commands still work. And possibly speedwalking. *blinks his eyes innocently* Smile

Apprentice Joined: 11 Aug 2006 Posts: 100

I wrote was trying to write an alias that would color my chats a random color, and I also ran into this problem.. I got around my troubles by making an oninput trigger instead of an alias.

Example:
pattern:

Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 5:28 pm

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

I suppose I could make an OnInput trigger that automatically quotes all special characters when the line doesn't start with a "#" or ".".

Hmm, it doesn't work. In my Command Input trigger I have a pattern of:
(.*)
And a script of:
%quote(%1)
(for proof of concept)

But I still get the illegal token error.

Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 12:04 am

%quote doesn't currently quote the = character. It only quotes the characters listed in your special character preferences. So it also doesn't quote parenthesis either. I'll look into improving that.