Re: The Latest Scheme

> 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.

Lua is a cute language. (It's not a word I use often. :)  As well as 
being a more powerful language, Scheme seems to fit FEAR like a glove.


* Scheme code and data lives in a "scripting" environment which allows 
you to view and change code interactively as it is running.

* Scheme is efficient, and can be compiled down to fast native code if 
necessary.  Interpreted code and native code can live side by side 
seemlessly.

* Scheme is a programmable programming language, so it can be changed to 
suit the problem at hand.  Many logic reasoning engines use lisp, and 
those are going to be important in games soon.

* S-expressions are a hierarchical data format, just like XML.  The 
advantage is that Scheme is designed to deal with this format so I don't 
need additional C++ XML parsers.  For example it could represent my FSM 
or RBS as S-expressions saved from the IDE and load them up as any other 
script.

* I can still do code generation from so-called SXML, using SSAX and 
other scheme-based tools.  Having used XSTL for a while, being able to 
use a proper language for generating code is a pleasure.

* Scheme offers high level abstractions, literally any kind you can 
think of.  I think it should be possible to express a subsumption 
architecture using Scheme macros. (There are no equivalents in any other 
language.)

* Scheme is easy to implement, and lightweight.  There's Kawa so 
integrating it with Java - and the Eclipse IDE - should be easy.

I could probably go on :)  I think using scheme would result in the 
minimal amount of redundancy and design bloat.


> I have to disagree with you that using multiple scripting languages per 
> project is too much hassle.

I hope that's the case, otherwise people won't use FEAR.  Most projects 
already have scripting for their game logic.


Alex


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