As I understand it your cooler contains an object representing several six packs of beer, and when the player tries to take a six pack of beer, a separate six pack of beer object is moved into scope. Both objects now respond to āsix-packs of beerā because the parser automatically implies the plural of āsix-pack of beerā.
I confess the first time I read your post I didnāt understand how your proposal would meet the problem, but on re-reading I think what you mean is that you could get round your problem if the parser used the disambigNames in this situation (since you could make them more meaningful), but itās not doing so because the name properties arenāt identical. This is certainly something I can take a look at. The current behaviour wasnāt of my design; itās something advLite has inherited from Mike Robertsās Mercury parser code (and in a part of it I havenāt really looked at that closely, since up until now it seemed to be working fine). I would have thought the more useful behaviour would be to have the disambigName default to the name, and for the parser always to use the disambigName when disambiguating (which would more or less have the effect you were suggesting), but there may be some reason for not doing it this way, and a quick look at Mikeās code suggests to me that it may not be trivial to achieve.
So, I think there may be an issue for me to look at here, but until Iāve had a chance to look into it further (and itās clearly not going to be a five-minute job), Iām not sure what the right answer is.
In the meantime, there are a number of other possible ways round your particular problem that you may want to consider:
(1) Since your cooler can presumably contain only a finite number of six-packs, you could define a SixPack class and put, say, a dozen instances of it in your cooler. This would represent the actual situation I assume youāre trying to model in the simplest and most direct way, and dispenses with the need for a separate six-packs (plural) object. Itās a possible solution here since the total number of six-packs that are realistically likely to exist is quite low (it would not work so well for a bunch of grapes and individual grapes, but thatās not what youāre trying to model).
(2) Alternatively, you could stop the six-pack (singular) object matching the plural (six-packs) by giving it some other plural the player would never type, e.g. āsix-pack[-zz]ā. This is essentially the solution employed in an analogous solution in the Airport game example in the adv3Lite Tutorial.
(3) Another possibility would be to give one or other object a vocabLikelihood of 10, say, so that the parser would always prefer it to the other when both were in scope (thus avoiding the disambiguation question altogether).
(4) It may be that making the six-packs (plural) a CollectiveGroup would help, since this would enable you do define which actions were handled by the CollectiveGroup object and which by its members (in this case the single six-pack).
This raises more general questions about collective/individual dispenser/dispensed type disambiguation that Iāll need to put some more thought into, alongside your disambigName suggestion.