[gameprogrammer] Re: "Mission Efficiency" - Blue Collar coding

Don't feel bad Bob,

I use Python daily (my company has chosen it as the language of choice for
user apps), and I detest the white space formatting, it prevents some of my
normal white spacing conventions I like to use for clarity and the ability
to jump from opening to closing braces (more than 1 error where my logic was
outside of a loop it was meant to be in).

It does have some pros over our previous language of choice TCL/TK, mainly
its syntactically similiar to C and they didn't go out of their way to
rename common functions so I can use standard man pages to find out more
about a function. On the other hand, while its similiar, it can be just
different enough to cause grief if you have to spend time jumping from
language to language. I do spend quite a bit of time relying on the compiler
to catch stupid syntax errors (missing semi-colons).

At the end of the day it is as powerful as PERL, but without as much pain
for me, and before the PERL religious zealots attack, I said 'pain for me'.
I understand the usefullness of PERL and work in it when required, I just
have no love for it.

What I think would be nice is to invoke the Python runtime environment and
have it read my C program and run, so my script and compiled code source all
look and feel the same. Now that would be useful!!! Okay, well maybe not so
much for strings, the entire point of using the scripting language is to get
away from walking through character arrays.  I know you had started a thread
a while back on what would make the perfect language to write games in, but
you had taken that offline.  I would be interested in any feedback you'd
care to share though.

Honestly i'm beginning to think games require a whole new paradigm. The
graphics portions (and internal datastructures) lend themselves well to
being organized in an objective manner, the system integration (signals,
threading) and much of the mathmatic areas seem to scream for a functional
layout, while the AI is a wonderful candidate for an associative set of
relationships (Go Prolog!).

Just a couple of thoughts, those with more experience in the game industry
can feel free to correct me,
Jason.

-----Original Message-----
From: gameprogrammer-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:gameprogrammer-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Bob Pendleton
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 6:24 AM
To: Gameprogrammer Mailing List
Subject: [gameprogrammer] Re: "Mission Efficiency" - Blue Collar coding


On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 07:18, Latimerius wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 02:48:03PM -0500, Bob Pendleton wrote:
>
> > Python uses indentation as part of its syntax. Which is just plain
> > wrong.
>
> It just plain doesn't matter IMHO.  This must be the least important of
> a language's features.
>
> I was surprised, too, when I first found out that Python uses
> indentation as part of syntax.  But I just adapted.  After all, Python
> makes me do what I'd do anyway, I just leave the braces out.

I know... I don't really understand my reaction to this feature of the
language. Even though I can come up with a list of reasons why it is
wrong to use indentation as syntax, when I think about it rationally I
don't understand why I feel that way.

I have implemented and even designed languages that were line oriented
rather than stream oriented and I have written a lot of code in line
oriented languages such as assembly and FORTRAN and BASIC... The way it
is done in Python still bothers me. Well, what can I say, I downloaded
the Python docs. May be I'll give it another try.

                Bob Pendleton

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+ Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer +
+ email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx             +
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