[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Compound & S-Land

[Ben Webb <ben@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 07:27:13AM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Ben Webb wrote:
> > FreecivAC at http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/, which embeds S-Lang into
> > the server in a limited fashion (part of the newcompounds patch).
> Why did you start using S-Lang? IMHO, the previous approach was much
> nicer.

It was easier to embed than Python. Python brought in a lot of stuff
that was overkill for the task at hand (basically, the scripts only
needed to do simple tests, and add or multiply things). But there's no
reason why Python couldn't be used for this, although the SWIG bindings
are substantially more verbose than the simple S-Lang stuff. Given the
amount of interest in the Python binding at the time (i.e. essentially
none) I was unwilling to take over its maintenance.

IIRC, the Python interface needed a lot of work to integrate it nicely
into the Freeciv build system, and it broke the server command line
interface (I'm guessing some dubious interaction with readline somewhere
along the line).

        Ben
-- 
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"Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes."
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