This page collects information about weapons in real life.  We can later use this to figure out how weapons should work in nethack.

== The problem ==

The problem, according to jonas, is that weapons in nethack are not very distinctive: they have a name and a damage stat but not much else (this is a bit exaggerated).  See the annotation in http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/543.html about D&D, and the comment in weapon.c which tells (I'm exaggerating this) that created the list of nethack weapons by typing the alphabetically first half of the weapons table from D&D version 1, which itself tells nothing about weapons other than their name and the damage they deal.

== Sources ==
* [http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Polearm] has lots of info about polearms stolen from [http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Fun/polearms.html]
* Esr says he knows some things about historical weapons, so we're asking him.  Most of the stuff below is from him.

== Spears and javelins ==
Javelins are more for throwing, spears are more for thrusting in melee.  One thing you can do with a spear that you can't with a javelin is ground it against a charge.  Should be devastating against large monsters dumb enough to impale themselves.

== Knives and daggers ==
Knives have one edge, daggers have two.

== Swords ==
One distinction is optrimum fighting range.  You've got your longer-range weapons like longsword and two-hander, intermediate like katana and broadsword (the term "broadsword" is not really historical but I'm ignoring that) short-range weapons like shortsword, and infighting weapons like daggers.