Zugg Software :: View topic - Settings Editor

Wanderer Joined: 08 Jan 2003 Posts: 60

Is there some way to turn off the feature that autodetects the style? Because it keeps screwing up on me. Like if I have the style as zMUD Script and my code includes the | char, it decides it's a string list and resets the style, screwing it up. Now, it doesn't actually change the code, so it still works, but if I have to go edit it I have to go change it *back* to zMUD Script, and *then* it has screwed it up, at least by adding ( ) around the code I then have to delete.

Also, does zMUD really have to use something so simplistic as | and () to encode string lists? There's at least a dozen ASCII codes not being used for everything that can be used for that, and it is highly frustrating to try to put | and ( and ) in string list entries. (Quoting them with ~ does not work.)

And now that I think about it, I wish there were a way that I could tell the command line to ignore special characters entirely, while still having them work in scripts. I tried turning off the parsing mode, but if I do that I can't use aliases anymore. And I tried turning off the separator char so at least I can use a semicolon in my speech without it screwing up, but then any scripts with multiple commands don't work anymore.

(I'm noticing that a lot of my complaints are of the form, "How do I turn such-and-so off?" I don't think zMUD has featuritis; in fact, I think it has an excellent number of features, and as time goes on I find myself using new ones all the time. But zMUD also makes a *lot* of assumptions about how people do things...like Microsoft products do...and I'd like it to be so that I control how things get done instead of it trying to be "smart".)

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

quote:

Is there some way to turn off the feature that autodetects the style? Because it keeps screwing up on me. Like if I have the style as zMUD Script and my code includes the | char, it decides it's a string list and resets the style, screwing it up. Now, it doesn't actually change the code, so it still works, but if I have to go edit it I have to go change it *back* to zMUD Script, and *then* it has screwed it up, at least by adding ( ) around the code I then have to delete.

Also, does zMUD really have to use something so simplistic as | and () to encode string lists? There's at least a dozen ASCII codes not being used for everything that can be used for that, and it is highly frustrating to try to put | and ( and ) in string list entries. (Quoting them with ~ does not work.)

And now that I think about it, I wish there were a way that I could tell the command line to ignore special characters entirely, while still having them work in scripts. I tried turning off the parsing mode, but if I do that I can't use aliases anymore. And I tried turning off the separator char so at least I can use a semicolon in my speech without it screwing up, but then any scripts with multiple commands don't work anymore.

(I'm noticing that a lot of my complaints are of the form, "How do I turn such-and-so off?" I don't think zMUD has featuritis; in fact, I think it has an excellent number of features, and as time goes on I find myself using new ones all the time. But zMUD also makes a *lot* of assumptions about how people do things...like Microsoft products do...and I'd like it to be so that I control how things get done instead of it trying to be "smart".)

There is not yet a way to selectively turn off special-character parsing in the command-line while still allowing it in the code. I'm not so sure that's even a possibility, but to get around any in-the-way special characters you can reassign them to a different, less-often-used character. For instance, one of the programmers of Dragon's Gate MUD reassigned the comment/command separation trigger (semi-colon by default) to the back-tick found under the tilde (~).

EDIT: There is no way to turn off that auto-style thing, but I suppose Zugg could add such a toggle or make that part of the code a little smarter/flexible/etc. I believe the way it works now is by parsing the text and looking for certain things--if there's a | it becomes a list, if there's an = in the text between the | it becomes a datarecord, if there are script commands/functions it becomes script, and if it has any of the #MSS stuff (javascript, vbscript, etc) it's set as that.

li'l shmoe of Dragon's Gate MUD

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

If you don't want to reassign the special characters you can use a double quote " at the start of any command line you do not want parsed. This method will also work in scripts but you must provide a closing quote.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

The | was what was initially used when stringlist where introduced into zMUD (that was many years ago). Zugg's tries the best he can to not break anyone's existing scripts when releasing a new version, and that's where the vicous cycle started: people started using the | literaly to build stringlists on the fly, and Zugg couldn't change the | because scripts would break.

If he could, he would change the | characters to some non-printable character. You can see that record variables already use non-printable characters to separate keys and values. That's why you can't build record variables on the fly, except by writing this non-printable characters using the %char function.

Kjata