[Freeciv-Dev] Perl for Freeciv scripting? (was: Plans for 1.12)

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On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 06:01:53PM +0200, Artur Biesiadowski wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> 
> > And ugly/beauty issue is very personal.

The real issue is useability, which, if all is well, is interpersonal :)

> I agree, but most perl programs would win Obsfucate-C contest without
> modification :)

If the jury consists of C programmers.

> Seriously, I'm mainly talking about proliferation of $ @ % etc in perl
> code.

Have you ever programmed in Perl?

> Also fact that function can have different side effect depending
> on fact what type of return I want from it at call site is very 'ugly'
> for me.

I agree, this is confusing at times.  Perl often has many ways of
expressing the same thing; I like that, it makes it easier to express
yourself clearly.  But it also tends to overload notation to mean
different things in different contexts; this is confusing.  But it's
easy to avoid confusion by using more explicit code and good indentation.

I don't think syntax is an important consideration anyway.
The legibility of Freeciv scripting will mostly depend on a clear
API and the coder's programming style, not on the language used.

If Perl is used, I suppose the code will be object oriented
and use XS modules.  Most of the code will be object method calls.

  http://www.perl.com/pub/doc/manual/html/pod/perlembed.html
  http://www.perl.com/pub/doc/manual/html/pod/perlcall.html

The core of Perl may not be particularly suitable for Freeciv scripting,
But its thousands of add-on modules change the picture.  XML processing
would be easy to add, for instance.  A disadvantage is that with Perl,
the code can literally be doing *anything* without the user being
aware of it.  And it will be resource hungry.

> > If you know C, you can start programing perl after 5-minute course.

The object orientation takes some effort, in my experience.
Knowing Perl 4 (without OO, without data structures) is not enough.

> And BTW, on Suse
> 
> perl 4312 Kb
> guile 757 Kb
> 
> but it is not important as perl is mandatory install.

Not so on Solaris, or MS Windows.
 
> Artur
 
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