Re: I3

From: Daniel A. Koepke (dkoepke@circlemud.org)
Date: 11/26/01


On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, John C. A. Bambenek wrote:

> Obnoxious comments about how I should find the parse errors myself
> need not respond.  It's a matter of control characters I can't see in
> a crappy download, not a missing semicolon.

One of the many, many, many ways to view control characters:

  $ cat -v filename | less

There are just as many, if not more, similarly trivial ways to remove
them.  Especially if the mysterious control characters are just \r\n pairs
at the end of lines (MS-DOS format) instead of UNIX's \n line terminator.
This has been gone over so many times, I'll not bother to provide proper
directions.  See any of fromdos, perl, sed, tr, your editor's search and
replace function, loading and saving in pico, or unzip -a.  This not even
scratching the surface of the answers to an old newbie question.

Also, I have just, for the first time, looked at this code.  It is very
poorly written.  Ensure that you have followed the directions.  The code
is fragile and unmaintainble.  If you don't follow the directions, you
will get bizarre errors.  For instance, a failure to include the i3.h file
as directed will produce parse errors that are, at first glance,
completely inexplicable.  Of course, I trust that you checked and double
checked something so basic as this long before you wrote the list to ask
for a handout and call others obnoxious, so it's only included here for
completeness...

Unfortunately, the person responsible for the I3 code spent more time
lamenting the differences between what he was familiar with and CircleMUD
than he did noting how things like modularity and clean include files are
a boon to writing maintainable code.  (In fact, he complains _about_
modularity and clean include files.)  As a result, this code ends up being
black-box stuff that you won't ever really want to look at.  Forget about
security.  On first glance, it appears to be trivial for any remote I3
network node to crash your Mud.

-dak

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