[MUD-Dev] How much should be offloaded to Scripting?

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 11 February 2004, Acius wrote:

> My inclination is to say "do ALL of it in the script language."
> Unless you're doing something interesting (AI or pathfinding or
> simulation or something), you'll probably never max out your CPU,
> and will save a lot of time.

I did this with MUDDLE (the language I use for MUD2). I designed a
scripting language powerful enough to be used to write its own
compiler, but honed for writing MUDs. The game engine was little
more than an interpreter for this language.

I was concerned, however, that I might end up with a scripting
language that needed a scripting language of its own.  Fortunately,
it didn't - it could say everything I wanted to say succinctly
enough that I didn't have to pass any descriptive power to some
other language interpreted by MUDDLE.

However, I would nevertheless recommend that anyone who plans on
doing "everything" in the scripting language consider the
possibility that all they may be doing is passing the problem one
level back, and instead of writing a scripting language interpreter
in C they may wind up writing a scripting language interpreted by a
scripting language interpeted in C (or as many levels as you want).

In other words, make sure that if you do put everything into a
scripting language, the scripting language is expressive enough that
it won't itself need a scripting language.

		Richard
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev