[DGD] New DGD user introducing himself...

[Troels Therkelsen]

Hey all,

I apologise in advance if this e-mail is long and rambling, and if it
appears twice on this list... I had forgotten which address I signed up
with ;-)

I've been lurking on this list for a couple of months while I read the list
archives (sigh, 2000+ mails, and my brain melted after the first 500 ;), and
poked around with the kernel lib and getting a general feeling for DGD.  I
used to be true blue MudOS, but as Dworkin said in a post, it hasn't seen
active development since 1997 (although Marius did try his best to pick it
up, but he lost interest in it).  MudOS is now dead as a collaborative effort
to make a good driver.

I make no pretenses that what the main reason I decided to look around for
other drivers.  So far I've been very impressed with what DGD has to offer,
but the most important thing to me is that the maintainer is someone
sensible and committed.

While it is going to be annoying to live without some of the MudOS features,
DGD has so much more way cool stuff :-)

And, some of that cool stuff I have some questions about...

With all the strict typing going around, and the addition of LWOs, I have to
say I'm curious why you can't type objects ala Java, eg.,

  void func(object /lib/lwo/sorter obj);

Then func() would only accept objects either inheriting /lib/lwo/sorter or
being that object themselves.  Without this object typing, basically all
your objects are 'mixed'.  Especially with LWOs and passing them between
functions, it would be very convenient to have the runtime system do the
type checking for you.

Maybe too Java-ish for LPC, I dunno.  This certainly is a Java-ism:

  FACTORY:
  object sorter() {
    object ret = new_object {
      int compare(int a, int b) {
        return ((a == b) ? 0 : ((a > b) ? -1 : 1));
      }
    }

    return ret;
  }

  A:
  int *arr = ({ ... });

  arr = sort_array(arr, FACTORY->sorter());

But nevertheless, it would be very useful for be able to make anonymous
LWOs at runtime... imho, anyway :)

Ok, I guess I've ranted enough... I basically just wanted to introduce myself
to the list.  By no means would I not use DGD if the above doesn't get added;
I'm very happy with DGD as it is (although I will be patching it; but the
extension interface is very nice so that shouldn't be as painful as it was for
MudOS).


Regards,

Troels Therkelsen

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