note: all of the below comments apply to any scripting language to be considered as a replacement, not just lua.
On Dec 26, 2007 3:31 PM, Freddie Witherden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > > > Please tell me what you think about switching to Lua as our scripting > > language. > > I think this point is important as the only one who I would trust to > edit the scripting language is Troman, who knows it like the back of > his hand. > One of the things we have been criticised for in the past is breaking > backwards compatibility -- there is a lot of good stuff from the 1.10 > days that is currently succumbing to bit-rot on Kim's hard disk. So I > am for switching to lua if an automated converter can be devised (and > am willing to help -- sounds interesting). > > * We allow people who do not like lua/are not familiar with it to > work with the classic scripting language. > that's not really true. i don't know what the state or quality of the wzscript debugger is, but it would be next to impossible to debug after conversion (for the conversion people, they just convert the wzscript, then ignore it and debug the lua. for someone like troman to debug, he'd have to figure out what the lua is doing, find out what part of his original code that represents, and determine if the bug is a conversion quirk, a lua-specific semantic bug, or a legitimate logical error. all of that would take so long to debug that he'd just have to switch over to lua if he wanted to get anything done. furthermore, if the warzone team wants to add new script hooks (which they eventually will), if they provide backwards compat hooks into the converter (to provide those hooks for the original scripting language), then maintainance actually gets worse. otoh, if they don't provide those hooks into wzscript, then all scripters will be forced to switch to lua to take advantage of the new functionality, or worse, use some kind of hideous "lua embedded in wzscript" kind of thing. either way, if we make this switchover, eventually somebody is just going to deprecate the converter anyways. don't get any of this wrong: any progress in this discussion means doom for our "homebrew" language; sure, i'd love to be able to use python (i think it's overall syntactically much more elegant than lua, losing out in some places, and winning in others, especially due to the lack of an "end" token), however, i don't script for warzone, and not many people do... we can't effectively say "yeah, tons of people will flock over to warzone because it uses lua"... sure, we'll see some new modders, but they won't be doing anything that hasn't been done, at least not for a few years, and many of them will have the same problems as new modellers -- trying to push the engine into doing things it just can't handle, just because they *can* get away with it. if we're already going to be using lua to control sequences, then i think the best way to use it for scripting is to have it work *alongside* wzscript (as in you can use either one), where each has the exact same available engine hooks. maintainance wouldn't be that bad... you just set up some common include to describe the hooks, then have code generators create the abi's for each language. > > What does everyone else think about creating a branch for this > endeavour? That way we can track progress and test easily. > > Regards, Freddie. > > _______________________________________________ > Warzone-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/warzone-dev >
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