The task for today is verb creation, and it poses a particularly nasty issue. When we create a new verb, do we keep it in alphabetical order or do we just stick it onto the end of the array? It seems appropriate to put it into alphabetical order, but that entails recomputing all the consequence pointers in the entire verb set, a process that strikes me as fraught with danger. I could screw up the whole damn data set with one tiny mistake here.
What's so important about alphabetical order anyway? It was important once, when I had to plow through everything on paper, but now, with the database in the machine, shouldn't it be pointless? I've always thought of the database in alphabetical terms, but perhaps I can dump the whole alphabetical deal and substitute another way of looking at the data. Moreover, alphabetical ordering runs against the grain of the way that the player should be thinking about the network. I'll need a search function, to be sure, but all in all I think that alphabetical ordering is an unnecessary burden.
So what goes in its place? I need a fast way to move around the network that's orthogonal to the network navigation. The classifier is one way; perhaps it could be souped up. I'll dispense with the MainScrollBar, as it will now be useless. I need to come up with some faster ways to handle the classifier.The problem is just like what we use a dictionary or thesaurus for. We want to know if there's a word out there for it. And if we're ready to create a similar word, how do we know that we haven't already done so?
I don't know how to solve this problem but I do know that the alphabetical ordering has to go. I'll soup up the classifier later. For now, the only change is the loss of alphabetical order. MainScrollBar remains in place for the moment, too.