Re: Scripting

[Eero Pajarre <epajarre@koti.tpo.fi>]

Jorrit Tyberghein wrote:
> Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> 
>>That can happen in any language that's sufficiently powerful to do the
>>things most games need to do. Unless you are prepared to go without
>>pointers, you are going to see these kinds of issues.
> 
> 
> I object to that. Language like Java and Python manage to avoid these
> pointer issues while still remaining sufficiently powerful (Java is used
> for large commercial applications even). So pointers are not an essential
> language feature at all.
> 
> 
I have always thought that the way data structures are done in Java
very much resembles typical pointer usage. Garbage collection
of course relieves me from manually freeing  data, and indexing errors
are also checked (but I can get the latter also in C++, and I could
even use gc there). Still it is quite possible to make mistakes
with java which correspond to stale and rogue pointers in C++.
(For example you return a object, which is piece of your main data structure,
without cloning the object, latter a prosessing function modifies
this object, without you understanding that your main data structure is
modified)

After saying that I still use scripting (lua) in my game. My number
one reason for this was avoiding the need of development environment
at the end user platform. Latter I have started to value the ability
to making the protected and  "easy" environment for end user modifications.



			Eero