Dynamic language

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.713.1331843912.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 04:13:42PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message
>> news:mailman.709.1331842273.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>> > On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 09:15:34PM +0200, Manu wrote:
>> >> On 15 March 2012 20:59, so <so at so.so> wrote:
>> > [...]
>> >> > On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 17:30:49 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> > [...]
>> >> >> I just talked about D because D rox, but if you are doing it for
>> >> >> education, Lisp is a good choice because it is fairly unique.
>> >> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > I'd love to use D but it is not an option is it? At least for the
>> >> > things i am after, say game scripting.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> I dunno, that sounds like a pretty interesting idea to me! :)
>> >
>> > It certainly is, though it does bring up the problem of what to do
>> > if the game scripting is editable at runtime. Does that mean we'll
>> > need to bundle a D compiler with the game? Doesn't seem practical.
>> >
>>
>> Why not?
> [...]
>
> So your game will have to ship with dmd and optlink bundled?
>

As long as it's a platform on which dmd runs, and you have permission from 
Walter, I don't see the problem with that. Sure, it'd be another thing to 
deal with in the installation/packaging scripts, but it shouldn't be too 
bad.

Plus, people have already done the same sort of thing with Python/Ruby (not 
sure about games, but other apps). Yea, scripting in Python/Ruby is probably 
super-easy if your app is already written in Python/Ruby, but when isn't 
then you're really just doing the same thing as you would to do your 
scripting in D.

'Course, if you *like* dynamic interpreted languages, then yea, just simply 
using Lua would be easier. Point is though, I don't think I'd say it's 
impractical with D. At least for desktop/laptop games anyway (platforms dmd 
doesn't run *on* could still use D for scripting, but just not edited 
in-game - could still reload in-game if the platform has dynamic lib 
support, but it'd be compiled off-line...possibly even by the game sending 
the code to a compile server).

And all that would only matter for user-generated content. Any built-in 
scripts would naturally just already come pre-built. Hell, they could even 
come statically-linked if you wanted - develop them using the dynamic 
editing tools, and then statically link when you're ready to ship.

Speaking of such things, I wonder how hard it would be to port dmd to run on 
another platform? Targeting that platform might be a lot of work, but just 
making it run on it...it *is* written in C++, probably the second-most 
common language in the world (just behind straight C), and it's not like it 
does a bunch direct hardware I/O access, or GUI, or anything like that. So 
I'd imagine mostly just some occasional OS calls and assembly. Don't know 
how much of that there is in there.

> -- 
> "The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 
> degrees and try again."

I love this one :)