Comprehensive Explanation Needed

[x2495iiii]

I have been working with Alice for quite some time and I've scoured the textbook I have and have not found any explanation as to how some of the built-in functions in Alice work. Could someone explain:
World Functions
1. mouse distance from left edge/top edge (tried to use but didn't understand how numbers were calculated)
2. IEEE Remainder of A/B (probably some math I haven't learned yet)
3. right, up forward (no idea at all about this one)
Object Functions
1. Object's quaternion (????)
2. object's part named key (does that have to do with subparts?)
3. object's variable named variablename and of class valueclass
Also, all of the seldomly used properties for objects would be nice, especially specular highlight exponent