Re: Suggestions for possible future commands

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#413

From: Valdis Kletnieks
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1993 04:28

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On Sat, 18 Sep 1993 10:38:17 -0400 Jay Vassos-Libove said:
>How about it - is /whowas possible now?

I refuse to implement a command that has such a high probability of
not functioning correctly.  Basically, the problem is that once a person
leaves from RELAY, RELAY forgets everything it knew about the person.

The simplistic solution would be to leave the stuff around and hope it
didn't get mangled - for you programmers, this is called "dereferencing
a null pointer" and is a guaranteed way to have something ugly happen.

A more ambitious solution would be to keep track of all departures in a
linked list, and keep them around for a known amount of time (5 minutes or
whatever).  However, this has the disadvantage of being much more of a
pain to implement.

If somebody can explain to the new users "how come I did a /whowas and
it didn't work", then I'll think about it... ;)

/Valdis

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Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1993 00:28:44 EDT
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From: Valdis Kletnieks <VALDIS@VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU>
Organization: Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Subject: Re: Suggestions for possible future commands
In-Reply-To: Message of Sat,
              18 Sep 1993 10:38:17 -0400 from <libove@JERRY.ALF.DEC.COM>
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