[MUD-Dev] Clients based on Netscape 5?

[Chris Gray]

[Caliban:]

[Sorry for the incomplete quoted lines - they got chopped off.]

:So you don't consider Java just as proprietary as NSAPI and ASP, even though S
:repeatedly lied and cheated in its presentation of the technology?

Lets ignore politics here (and I haven't the faintest idea of what you are
going on about anyway). From my point of view, I have official specs on
the Java language and libraries. That allows me to write portable programs,
that will run on UNIX machines, Windows machines, BeBoxes, etc. *That* is
what makes Java worth considering in any kind of project that involves
networks and communications.

:Well, considering I was trying to come up with solutions that would be more fe
:with the release of the Netscape source, I don't think platform-independence h
:place in the list.

Huh? Netscape runs on lots of platforms. Using it doesn't necessarily
break any platform-independent issues, so I think platform-independence
is a very good thing to have in a list of desireable attributes.

:JavaScript is not designed to do heavy-duty programming. Neither were most MUD
:programming languages. The advantage I see here are that people already know i
:value outside the MUD, and the developer can worry about other things instead
:building a language to work in. Of course, people will complain that it isn't
:compiled or even tokenised and how can you take any interpreted language serio
:anyway?

That attribute of JavaScript is precisely why I think it is a poor choice
for a MUD server programming language. Here I'll present some opinions of
mine. Learning a new well-designed language is easy (learning some of the
god-awful scripting languages with excessive amounts of escapes, wierd
syntaxes, etc. is not easy). Implementing an interpreter for a well-designed
language is easy. Yes, easy. The stress is on well-designed.

:True enough. In which case, write a C compiler. Any decent CompSci graduate,
:incidentally, already has. ;>

God, I hope not! What a horrible thing to force on the poor students
trying to learn what programming languages are all about, and what the
important things about writing compilers are. Pick a decent language,
without so many levels of interpretation and goofy rules.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA