A Tale of N GrUEs...

What is a GrUE? For the purposes of this adventure, I refer not to the ravenous denizens of the dark corridors of the G.U.E. Instead, my pets are Group User Environments. They are my tools for the exploration of many languages.

I'd like to make clear that this is not an attempt to pit languages against each other in competition and declare a winner. I'm a linguaphile (of both the spoken and coded varieties) — a wanna-be polyglot. This is my adventure at implementing a simple but substantial application in many languages to gain a familiarity and experience with each. Nothing more; nothing less.

My GrUE that I'll be implementing is a very simple variety of MUD. There won't be mobs. There won't be health, magick, items or quests. There won't even be directions. It won't be a game at all. What it will be is:

• A graph of Rooms connected by Corridors
• Multiple concurrent Users
• A simple set of Commands for
  
  

  Observation

  /look

  
  

  Travelling between rooms

  /enter dining room

  
  

  Creating new rooms

  /excavate west wing

  
  

  Modifying existing room connections

  /tunnel library of congress

  /block dining room

  
  

  Speaking to other users in a room

  /say Hello?

That's it. A malleable network of rooms in which concurrent users may travel and speak. Pretty boring, from a user's perspective, but hopefully a perfectly bitesized piece of functionality for experimentation.

I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I do...