Re: [glob2-devel] Embedded scripting language (again)

[Stéphane Magnenat]

Hi Bradley,

We have been thinking about this for a long time indeed. Don't forget that the 
determinism is not the only constraint, but another one is the ability to 
checkpoint the VM in order to save and reload a game. Another one is the 
ability to seamlessly run several threads (stories in SGSL) with co-routine 
operations (wait in SGSL) and preemption on buggy thread (stories are 
preempted after a thousand of continuous instructions in SGSL).

Marv and I have looked into several languages, the bests candidates are indeed 
Squirrel (http://squirrel.sourceforge.net/), but the multi-threading and 
checkpoint stuff is not trivial, and tea (http://lue.dk/prj/tea), whose 
author was willing to help, but who seems to have disappeared lately.

In fact, the language that looks the most suitable is... Unreal script, as it 
has concepts of states inside the language, which could be used to have, in 
the future, one thread per unit. But it is not free at all, so we better have 
to forget about it.

Lisp syntax are a big joke, lua is squirrel--, python is probably, for our 
use, slightly bloated, but this can be discussed.

I think that there is two main constraints for language choice:
* the capabilities of the language
* the language from the user perspective

I don't see how you want to fix missing capabilities afterwards, hacking on a 
big language is not trivial. For hacking, tea is probably the best candidate.

Have a nice day,

Steph

-- 
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