RE: New Interpreter (was RE: Marketing Xconq?)

["Erik Jessen" <ejessen@adelphia.net>]

My thought was this:
- add an interpreter, using a standard language (like Perl) that can
simply access existing data-structures.

The hard part (at least to me) is: how do you decide when to execute the
new programs?  It's easy to load data-structures at initialization time
& then have canned code execute it (what we do today).  It's harder to
say "execute this subroutine any time combat occurs".

Alas, I've not been able to locate my examples (I hope they weren't on
my system that had the HDD crash), but I'm hopeful of backups.

Erik


-----Original Message-----
From: Eric McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu] 
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 7:34 PM
To: Erik Jessen
Cc: 'xconq'
Subject: New Interpreter (was RE: Marketing Xconq?)

Hi Erik,

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Erik Jessen wrote:

> I think having an interpreted language (v. the current Lisp-format
> datafile) would put Xconq way ahead of the competition (like ADC2 et
> al).

In past discussion, with Bruno I think, I jokingly referred to 
this as GDL++. But seriously, I run into things that I would like 
to do in Xconq that GDL cannot presently handle. Foremost among my 
desires are definitions based on forumlae rather than just static 
tables. It would also be nice to script events into certain games.

However, if one writes a new interpreter, it would still need to 
work within the limitations of the backend data structures. 
Writing a new, more powerful interpreter is an ambitious project, 
but it would certainly be fun to do sometime. (As would expanding 
the standing orders syntax.)

  Regards,
   Eric

P.S. How are the Xconq example "games" coming? If you have them 
ready, we can toss them into CVS, perhaps under lib/examples.