xartum
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 07:40:23PM -0800, wikidiscuss@lojban.org wrote:
> It would thrill me if you develop a polling toolkit that is
> integrated with jbomu'e. If not, we can use Wiki polls. I don't
> want your valuable time to be taken up with this if it would be
> better spent elsewhere.
Really shouldn't be very hard; much easier overall to do it in the
game, I think, than require the gods to track information in
multiple places. A command that lists the current status of votes
in the moo and so on really doesn't strike me as terribly difficult.
> Am I correct that working magic would almost always involve Perl?
Again: *any programming language works*. Much of the *current* moo
code is in Perl, but there's no requirement at all that people use
that. C, Perl, Python and shell scripting are all fully supported,
and Ruby mostly works. New languages can be added by their
adherents working with me on a model for them to interact with the
MOO.
Furthermore, it depends on what you mean by "working magic".
Creating a castle from thin air is just a command; search for
"create" on
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban+MOO+Lojban+Commands&bl
(ok, creating a full, working castle would probably require quite a
few commands, but shouldn't require any programming at all; if it
does, that means the moo isn't feature complete yet, IMO)
You may at this point be wondering WTF actually *requires*
programming. The answer is that making objects that behave
differently from every other object on the moo requires programming.
A castle is just rooms and doors and furniture; the moo already has
all those things. A Meep (that is, an animal that listens to what's
said in a room and occassionaly repeats it; this is a common MOO
trick) is not something that is currently programmed in, and thus
would require programming.
Hmmm. It would be really nice if someone (i.e. epkat 
took the
previous few paragraphs, cleaned them up a bit, and stuck them on
The Lojban MOO page, as they seem pretty helpful.
> Lojban is then the equivalent of prayer ... or incanting familiars
> to do one's bidding, depending on how one feels about those who
> have breached a
> toposophic
> boundary.
Well, yes and no. As I said, there would be two types of things:
prayers (free-form requests to the dieties) and direct magic
(building and programming). The magic need not involve programming
at all; for most people's purposes it won't.
In fact, this would be an *excellent* place for someone to get the
oft-touted Lojban Programming Language working.
> It also makes me chuckle to imagine entreating specific
> real-world Perl programmers by name in one's prayers (or
> grimoires, if
> the Perl programmer is a
> BOFH).
That's very silly. Especially since one of the primary points of
mooix is that any language can be used.
> I like the idea of rules that are code. If someone finds a
> loophole, we should take a page from the story of "cheating Death"
> in "Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat" and not violate the world
> model. The gods should allow the mortal to keep whatever result
> he/she get from it, and then patch the code to prevent further
> exploit.
- nod*
See my other post for comments about more complex and subtle rules
than can be coded.
-Robin