Interesting, this still however has the problem of looking up characters when they're already known-- in the following sense: you have a prog which, say, has the blacksmith give an item to the person who says a phrase. Unless your merc has a fundamentally different setup, the phrasesayer should already have a pointer pointing to them in the prog-running function. But the prog-running function would only pass the phrase-sayer's name to the give command, which would use that name to look for the phrase-sayer in the room from scratch.