Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!ira.uka.de!yale.edu!think.com!sdd.hp.com!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!news.cso.uiuc.edu!s.psych.uiuc.edu!amead
From: amead@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Alan Mead)
Subject: TADS help requested
Message-ID: <Bzoq2z.5rt@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: usenet@news.cso.uiuc.edu (Net Noise owner)
Organization: UIUC Department of Psychology
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 23:47:22 GMT
Lines: 48

Well, I still haven't gotten the hang of this language...  TADS 2.0
has just made it worse.

First, a gripe: What is the attraction of case-sensitivity?  I mean I
probably spent 20 minutes trying to make my "verDoLookThru" method work
until I double-checked and found that it was supposed to be
"verDoLook>>t<<hru"  AND, right below, is LookUnder (in fact, in re-
scanning the list of verbs, the capitalization seems pretty damn
capricious: LookBehind, Lookin, Lookthru, LookUnder).  Is there some
strange tradition I'm not aquainted with that provides rules for
capitalization?

[BTW, I know I can dispell all the below errors with a compiler directive,
but I want to understand WHY I get them.]

Anyway, I have a function like

exitsfunc( actor )
...
;

called as

if (...)
  exitsfunc( Me )
...
;

And I get a run time error, "Wrong number of parameters", whenever I
call exitsfunc()?  Is this normal?  I don't see anywhere in the manual, 
either a coherent discusscusion of arguments to functions or an example
that seems qualitatively different from my situation.  Is this a bug?

Ok, then I'm pretty much completely lost regarding the number of parameters
that a method is passed...  Ie, for methods called by the interpreter (in
response to the player's commands), how many parameters are used and
why?  Like, is "actor" ALWAYS a parameter?  Or is there no parameters
for methods like look...

I've also had a lot of trouble understanding the stack usage.  I have two
bits of code, one a fucntion and one a method, and both do pretty much 
the same thing (print something and then return nil) and one works fine
and the other produces an error about "Stack underflow" unless I "exit"
after returning the nil?  Why the hell is that?

Thanks a lot; I'm fairly confused and rather frustrated.

-alan mead
