DESC

Tangled is a modular chat bot systemajig, originally intended to be used
with IRC.

The core system, which resides in tangled.py, is essentially a message router
that got a bit out of hand.  Theoretically a a module can be written in any
language that's heard of stdin/stdout and json.  The core executes the modules
and talks to them through the stdio pipe.

Modules are identified by their 'shortname' - a short (say, 3-12 chars,
preferably ascii) and unique name that is used internally to address
communications.  These communications occur through stdin/stdout and are
line-based.  This is possible because the modules are executables and
called in a beautiful non-blocking fashion by the router.

PROTOCOL 

The core talks to modules using json. The base message is the following:

{
  "source": shortname of the sender, | One of these two, depending on 
  "target": shortname of the target, | direction of message
  "type": descriptor of the message type
}

It can contain various other key/value pairs depending on the message
type.  See json.org for more information of the format and what it can
contain.

Another way to run a module is by talking to a python interface directly, by
throwing around dicts (which are called "msgobj"s throughout the source)
rather than json strings.  There are two reasons for this interface to exist:
it saves some overhead (no need for another python process), and I haven't
figured out yet how to make one script talk on IRC as well as through
stdin/stdout.  Currently the python interface doesn't do anything to stop a
module from locking up the entire bot, so don't use it unless you're quite
sure the module won't block.

For a rough idea of the future plans I have for Tangled you ought to check out
the file tangled.org (formatted for emacs' org-mode) which has mostly
todo-items.