Command compatibility

If you played a MUSE of this lineage in the early 90s, GenMURK is meant to feel familiar under your fingers. GM-R22 — the command-set compatibility requirement — says GenMURK supports at minimum the same player-facing command set (verb names and invocation syntax) as the reference, so you can pick up where you left off. The implementations are GenMURK’s own clean-room code and the security model is modernized; what is preserved is the surface you type.

The honest state: compatibility is being built to a preserved list

The canonical reference command list is a preservation task — captured from the behavioral reference and historic-user knowledge, tracked separately and not yet finished. Until it lands, the commands GenMURK ships are drawn only from its own requirements of record, not from anyone’s memory of the wider MUSH family — that is a deliberate provenance discipline, not a shortcut. So this page describes a surface that is provisional: verb names and argument punctuation may be reconciled when the canonical list arrives.

What works today, end to end: speaking (say, emote), reaching people elsewhere (page, whisper, announce), getting around (go, enter, leave, look), handling things (get, drop — over a thing’s pickup lock), building (dig, open, create, set, name, describe, lock), taking a destruction back (destroy, undestroy within a recovery window), in-world mail (mail — send, list, read, delete), moderation for wizards (warn, boot, silence, unsilence, all audited), and — the thing that makes a MUSE a MUSE — programming the world: attaching $-commands to objects (an attribute valued $<pattern>:<program>, wildcard captures and all), event triggers that run when someone arrives or uses a thing, a fairly-scheduled command queue, and softcode-driven styled output. The $ sigil is preserved from the domain; the exact separator punctuation is one of the details the canonical capture will settle.

A scripted v1 playable slice ties the whole thing together — register and log in, walk and talk across rooms, build and lock, attach a $-command another player triggers, page and mail, a wizard moderates, and a destroy is taken back — running green end to end on the local stack every build.

Where GenMURK diverges — and why

Compatibility has one hard limit: the sandbox always wins. GenMURK runs player-written softcode as untrusted input under strict resource budgets (GM-R14), because running a programmable interpreter open to the network without isolation reflected the norms of the reference’s era, and current security practice calls for sandbox-by-construction. Where a reference command would conflict with that, GenMURK keeps the safe behavior and records the difference here. This is the state of the art advancing — the reference is honoured as what taught the domain.

• User softcode never shadows a built-in command. A $-command only matches a line no fixed verb claims, so an object in a room can never intercept another player’s go, lock, or quit — that would be a spoofing vector, and modern security practice keeps fixed verbs fixed. If the canonical capture shows the reference resolved this differently, the difference will be recorded here; the safe behavior stays.
• Styled output is a fixed vocabulary, never raw escape codes. Softcode styles text through markup that the client renders from a fixed table (emphasis and the classic colors). Raw terminal control bytes are stripped at the server boundary, whatever path they arrive by — styling can decorate your transcript, never rewrite someone else’s terminal.
• Locks — bounded expression grammar. A lock’s boolean expression (the “key”) accepts a deliberately-bounded, safe subset of the reference’s key language: boolean operators, #N keys (you are or carry the object), owner(#N) (you own the object), and ATTR:glob attribute predicates. Where the reference key form is richer, GenMURK rejects it outright rather than approximating it — and evaluation is itself bounded in length, nesting depth, and steps, so a hostile lock terminates fast and fails closed. A lock must never accidentally open. The lock verbs and the three lock kinds (enter, use, pickup) are preserved.
• Picking things up honours the pickup lock. get checks a thing’s pickup lock before it moves; an unlocked thing left in a room is takeable by anyone present (the reference default), a locked one only by whoever passes its key.
• Undestroy is by number, not by name. A destroyed object leaves your view (only wizards see the recovery bin), so you take it back with undestroy #<number> — the number the destroy confirmation prints, along with how long you have. Naming a thing you can no longer see would be a fiction; the number is honest.
• Moderation only reaches down. A wizard can warn, boot, or silence players below their tier; no one can moderate an equal-or-higher tier, and the root god is never a target. Every moderation act is written to an audit trail (who, what, when, why). Mail is quota-bounded (a capped inbox) and readable by wizards for moderation; its subject-line syntax is one more detail the canonical capture will settle (v1 mail is body-only from the command line).

Two surface details are still open pending the canonical capture, and are noted so nothing here overclaims: whether the reference used a prefix (such as @) or a /switch convention on building verbs, and the exact argument punctuation. The provisional surface uses bare verb names and = to separate a target from its payload; the capture will settle both.

The machine-checked source of this page is the compatibility harness in the application repository (app/gm-r22/), which runs on every change; this page is its returning-user narrative.