Container Theory -or- How Do You Code a Bucket?

So recently, I've been helping with a contents-listing problem during the >INVENTORY command involving coat pockets. Fixing that involved a change to WhatsIn and SpecialDesc- which I had intended to write up here, if it weren't for the issue that I want to talk about today (in fact, after WhatsIn and SpecialDesc, I have another thing I want to write about, so hey, the next entry will be a nice, multi-part post).

It turns out that my updated code still isn't working for that other person, and my hunch is that it has to do with the fact that my code has been slowly changing how containers are dealt with. Today, I figured I should finally run my designs past Kent. Eventually, we unearthed the point of contention where we disagreed on default behavior.

In Kent's view, a bucket coded in Hugo should have the following attribute definition:

    is container

While in my mind, it should be defined as such:

    is container, open

I think this might also be the difference in the coat objects as defined by me and the fellow I'm trying to help (since my new SpecialDesc code relies on the open attribute being used). To those who prefer the first definition, adding "open" must seem like overkill. As far as whether-contents-can-be-seen, I agree, as far as unopenable containers are concerned, it can be assumed that they are either open or transparent (otherwise, it's useless for them to be a container).

I was going to say that as far as other container behaviors go, I was worried about things like not-open, unopenable, transparent objects, but I had a Hugo-understanding breakthrough just now as I write this. I glanced over at the character class definition and was reminded that characters are transparent without being containers. I think part of my container-understanding problem is that I have so strictly associated "open" and "transparent" with containers (since thinking of transparent examples often make you think of something like a glass jar), when it's better to pretend that "transparent" has nothing to do with containers and remember that "open" only exists to work with "openable".

Anyhow, I feel pretty dumb that I have been so unclear on the concept for this long, but I'll try to update HbE so future coders don't fall into the same traps I did. Also, I still think that some of the hugolib contents-checking conditionals could be more concise, so I'm going to try to do something about that.

While I'll quickly admit being wrong on this issue, it's interesting that something as simple as containers can so easily catch people (maybe most people won't make the same assumptions I did, but I'm sure some do). I imagine the container code I wrote in ZIL recently is just as flawed. Ah, well.