[MUD-Dev] Ada?

[Jon Leonard]

On Tue, Feb 03, 1998 at 12:17:36PM +0000, Andrew C.M. McClintock wrote:
> Out of curiosity has anyone played around with Ada, and/or Ada within
> the framework of mudding at all? The language has piqued my curiosity,
> and I am currently learning more about it, and naturally I wondered
> if it was a suitable (or even ideal?) language for programming (or
> embedding in) a MUD. From what I have gathered Ada was designed to be
> fairly simple to learn, robust enough for real-time programming, and
> is standardized. One thing I did notice (reading a comparison of c++
> and Ada at www.adahome.com) is that Ada does not have multiple inheritance,
> though I haven't explored the language enough to see if there is a
> alternative or even if there should be.

I used Ada in a Large Scale Software Development class in school, and that
was enough to convince me that I didn't like the language.

I'd characterize Ada as being Pascal-like in feel (verbose, but not as
verbose as Cobol), and enforcing strict package boundaries and type
declarations.  As a result, I found that it took me quite a bit longer
to write a simple program in Ada that it would to write in some other
language that I knew (most likely C).

For use in a MUD context, there are some real-world software issues.  Ada
compilers are traditionally big, and either expensive or buggy.  They may
not be available on all of the machines you wish to target, either.  The
same problems apply to embedding in a MUD.

Languages embedded in a MUD have the additional constraint of needing to be
acceptable to your users.  I've written a lisp-like internal language for
my server, and comments I've gotten have ranged from "I don't know lisp
well enough" to "I won't learn lisp".  I think a fair amount of LPmud's
success derives from the fact that its server language looks like a
popular language.

Letting users have a programming language in a way that doesn't break your
security is another, mostly neglected, challenge.  I favor defining a 
small new language for programming internally and being exteremely careful
implementing it.  YMMV if you don't care how secure your server is.

> Any comments or discussion are welcome, if not list-side, email is fine.
> Thanks,

While Ada isn't very on-topic, internal language considerations are, so
I'm sending this to the list.

> -Andrew

Jon Leonard