[Reality] getting started?

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sunday, August 24, 2003, at 04:08 PM, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> This is the _whole point_ of adapters -- separating concerns so you 
> don't need to modify the original object to add functionality to it.

It might not be obvious why this is a good idea if you're coming from 
elsewhere :).  The systems we've currently got in the NewReality module 
are pretty thin.  Our goal is to expand them in flexibility (and 
therefore complexity) as much as we possibly can.  Eventually, you 
should be able to create a nylon rope which can be tied in a knot, tied 
to other objects, thrown out the side of a building, climbed up, 
climbed down, attached to a grappling hook and thrown, stretched, 
broken, cut, burned, used as a fuse on an explosive device, bitten 
through, eaten, digested by appropriately engineered animals and later 
excreted as crude oil and/or fissionable uranium.  Each of these 
different actions is a small system which has to be independently coded 
- and remember, we're just talking about rope, there!  The more 
separate that we can keep the systems (for example, the burning system 
should not need to know about climbing, even though the rope can be 
used for both of these), the easier it will be to keep a manageable 
amount of complexity in each module but still get a very flexible end 
result.