No, I don’t really think it’s an intended effect, since using [person] in one grammar changes the behaviour of a different grammar. Granted, they’re not independent grammars since they’re using the same verb, but that’s still a bit weird.
But notably the pickpocketing action itself doesn’t appear to behave any differently regardless of whether you specify [someone] or [person], or at least not in these tests.
Yeah, true. I didn’t mean that it was intended, I meant rather in the sense that there might be a causal connection due to the parsing mechanism, and that the manual gives a sort of oblique reference to the fact that using [person] can screw things up in certain edge cases.
Yes, if you do want to allow “steal all” then you’ll need some kind of multitoken! “[other things]” doesn’t work though; I just checked and “[other things]” only seems to work on things that you are holding. Which makes sense given that it is only used for the inserting action, and given my suspicion that it’s for stuffing things in your holdall (you do PUT ALL IN BAG when holding the bag, and you don’t try putting the bag in the bag).
(The documentation at §17.4 is really rather misleading about “[other things]”.)
Well, one of the cases is that “[a person]” doesn’t give you the only can do that to something animate parser error which you get with “[someone]”. Not sure if there are others.