[Divunal-devel] The Problem with Perspectives

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

If you don't know what something is *really* called, you can't talk about
it.

I.E.: `A blue box is here.'

bob$ take blue box

`There's no blue box here.'

What bob doesn't know is that the box is actually *green* but he's under a
spell of see-green-boxes-as-blue, so his perspective is messed up.

The situation is fairly obvious there, the author of
see-green-boxes-as-blue really ought to have synonymized that green box to
look like a blue one as necessary.

However, TR lets you run code to determine what the apparent name of an
object is (and in fact this is the *only* way in which perspective is
taken into account), so there's no way for the engine to determine every
possible name for an item without the author entering it.

I am going to make some improvements to tellEverybody[But] and moveTo that
involve changing their argument lists pretty soon, to help in fixing
perspectives up, but as long as I'm `in there', I figure I should try to
clear this issue up. Suggestions, anyone?

--glyph