Re: The Latest Scheme

> I meant Scheme will replace python within FEAR.  I do really like python 
> as a language, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it's not very 
> suitable for games.  It's a big language, focusing on intuitiveness at 
> the expense of implementation simplicity.  A lot of the discussion at 
> the GDC Python roundtable was about Lua and how that solved many of the 
> issues people were having with python (mainly bloatedness and speed of 
> execution).  Scheme beats python hands down at both of these, and 
> provides a really elegant foundation for most of FEAR.

I'd be interested to know why you prefer Scheme over Lua. I'm a big fan 
of Scheme and think it's great that you're moving FEAR away from C/C++ 
but I'd be interested to know what you don't like about Lua.

> I don't think game developers are ready for multiple scripting languages 
> per project at this stage (such a hassle), so anything that can be 
> converted to C/C++ is a bonus.

I have to disagree with you that using multiple scripting languages per 
project is too much hassle. In the development of a modern game several 
languages beyond C/C++ and a conventional scripting language have to be 
used, at the very least someone in the graphics team would have used a 
shader language, e.g HLSL, maybe someone would have had to use a little 
assembler and in the development of tools a 3D modelling language, e.g. 
MEL or MAXScript. So, when you think about it, many game developers are 
already having to be multilingual on a daily basis.

> Right, the standard only focuses on things that have proven useful and 
> necessary in a broad context.  Scheme is a programmable programming 
> language, so it can be extended in any way.  You can borrow lisp's OO 
> features, or one of the many lightweight versions (most likely what     
> I'll end up doing).  I'll probably use a component system in a similar way.
> 
> But there is a new revision of the standard underway, and objects may be 
> included.

There are a number of extensions O-O systems written entirely in Scheme, 
some are even pure functional, i.e. do not rely on side-effects to 
maintain object state, so there are plenty of options.

-RoB-


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