[DGD] DGD experimental, 'first' impression.

[bart at wotf.org]

Now that I have networking on DGD experimental, I have been able to 'play'
with it for a fair bit, and I got to love it :)

Wanted to share some of the things that I really appreciate about it, and some
ideas I implemented with it so far.

What I really like is the compile from strings feature, and related to that,
the include_file() functionality.

After a bit of experimenting, I ended up with a fully functional virtual
filesystem, that is, a part of the directory tree on my mud can be managed by
on object specifically assigned to that task. Any requests for files in that
tree are handled by that object, which worked fine for reading/writing files,
but you couldn't easily compile objects or include files from there without
some nasty hacks. Now this is possible in a very nice and clean way.

The point of such a virtual filesystem is that it can be stored somewhere
else, say in a version control system or a database.

The same idea can also be used to generate code on the fly from a template, a
script or some appropriate data, or to translate code to something DGD
understands in real time.

A simple thing I created with this is a 3d space containing 2^96 rooms. Not
something unique in itself, I did that before using cloned rooms. This however
is 2^96 rooms with potentially unique code generated for each room. This is
surely less efficient then using clones, but the code for it is so much
simpler, and its very nice when something like
find_object("/usr/domain/vrooms/32312132x37827x228282") simply works and
returns the appropriate room.

Then, I like the support for asn, tho I haven't used it for anything beyond
checking how it works. 

LWOs.. well, I like the concept, but right now don't have much of a use for
them in my lib. This might change tho.

All in all, the compiling/including from strings really changed things for me.

Bart.
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