On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 04:31:06PM -0500, Jeremy Nelson wrote:
> I formally request a mandate. There are three things that can be done:
>
> * I can work on EPIC5, as discussed.
> [EPIC5 is continued work on ircII/EPIC, picking up from epic4,
> working on things such as plugins, channel issues, and so forth]
This is what I would prefer, and I'll explain why..
Over the years, epic's script language which before was simply functional
has become actually useful. It is a niche language with a fairly high
barrier to entry for scripting, which is why people don't much like it.
However, this would not change simply because you put a real script
language underneath it all because the "problem" here is epic's ircII base
more than the language.
I can teach a person the basics for epic scripting in ten minutes. In
fact I _have_ done so. They can then modify a script pretty easily to
their hearts' content, but they probably could not/would not write their
own simply because writing a new script would be a massive undertaking.
Sure it's just a few aliases and a handfull of on's which mostly format
the strings as desired, but that's still massively complex for most people
because of the sheer volume of on's there are.
A ruby reimplementation of epic would not eliminate this problem. And
with epic5, there's really no real reason to bother supporting anacronisms
from epic's past which get in the way as others have pointed out in other
mails.
Personally, I think you'd find many more epic scripters out there fast if
you simply rewrote several of the default strings so the output looks a
little more usable to someone who knows next to nothing about the irc
protocol. I don't think you should go the way of bx and compile in a
garish combination of colorful strings into the client, but IMO format is
more important than color anyway. That would generally make it a lot
easier to write scripts all around. A good example, the strings that spit
out time() output... Those have gotta go. =)
--
Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Free software developer
We must know, we will know.
-- David Hilbert
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