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Arguments -- what does "any" mean?


I'm horribly confused by how arguments were parsed... I was under the
impression that 'any' meant 'any or none', even where prepositions
were meant.  But now I've come up across a problem that's got me
stumped.

What I have is a radio transceiver, which, for the sake of
convenience, has aliases of whatever channels you're listening to...
so for instance if you're listening to "chatter", "news" and "wizchat"
the radio transceiver will have aliases like this:

{"radio", "radio transceiver", "transceiver", "wizchat", "news",
"chatter"}


The radio has a verb on it called radio:"broadcast bc" which is
intended to take a line of text and broadcast it to the channel like
this:

bc wizchat this is a test
[WIZCHAT:Skud] this is a test

Now, I had put this args on teh verb as "this none any" meaning that I
didn't want it to have a preposition. But ti didn't work.  The old "I
dont understand" message -- it didn't even parse it.

So I told it teh args could be "this any any" and it still died.
However, if I used

bc wizchat is testing    or
bc wizchat at testing    or
bc wizchat into testing

It would work!  It seemed to only accept actual prepositions, not  no
preposition at all.

Now, why is it that neither of these two arg types (this none any and
this any any) seem to work?  Is there a way of getting it to work
short of turning the radio into a feature object, or putting the verb
somewhere on a player class?  Enquiring minds want to know!

Skud
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