[livrem]

The old Infocom parsers were quite advanced and support much more advanced grammar than I think I ever considered using in playing a game like that.

Later Infocom games, and later hobby interactive-fiction, has conventions like allowing some abbreviations (x for examine, l for look, i for inventory). My transcripts are full of those. Even if the parser will probably correctly parse a sentence like "I want to look at the table, please", in practice most of us will just type "x table" anyway.

The parser also allowed for combined commands, at least in somewhat later games, so you could type things like (I think) "examine the table and then pick up everything that is on it. then ask the dwarf to go north" as a single command (but that is still going to be split up into several actions, as if they had been entered as several shorter commands). I never learned enough about the parser to dare try to use things like that as I am not quite sure what the parser would understand or not. Easier to just input one thing at a time and see what happens before typing in the next thing.

While the parsers can be impressive, I just as happily go back to play the more simpler games like the ones by Scott Adams that used a two-word parser and only read the first three letters of each word. You really don't need more than that for good player input. That user interface is much easier to use as there are fewer things you may have to try to make the parser understand what you want to do.