[457] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: while, where, when, with -- WHAT?!

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sun Sep 25 04:04:49 1994 )

From: stewarta@netcom.com (Alex Stewart)
To: jcdst10+@pitt.edu (James C Deikun)
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 1994 00:54:26 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9409242217.B6599-0100000@unixs1.cis.pitt.edu> from "James C Deikun" at Sep 24, 94 11:04:02 pm

> C's for is definitely NOT something I'd like to see imported into 
> ColdMUD.  It's far and away the least intuitive statement in the language 
> and best left where it is.

agreed.  That'd be worse than leaving things the way they are.

> > 	while ((where a := .test()) a >= 0)
> > 		.do_something(a);

Basically, BTW, this is exactly what I was proposing before for a change to the
while syntax, except it breaks a bunch of current designs and is really
difficult to understand (it also makes things more complicated as i can show up
anywhere).  I at least proposed using {} for statements.  () should only be
used for argument lists and expressions.

If we're going to adopt something like this instead of assignment-expressions,
I still think it should be an aspect of the while syntax and should be along
the lines of:

  DO statement WHILE (expr) statement

with possibly the option of leaving off the "DO statement" part of things if
one wanted to.

I dunno.. I'm thinking of giving up on this whole thing, actually.. I do
actually agree with Greg some on the reasons behind assignments as statements
(now that I think about things, I really kinda like the design aspect of ColdC
that there's only one actual operation (effect) that can take place per line of
code)..  and I'm also not sure that changing the while statement is a good way
to do things either, because people are generally very familiar with it the way
it is currently and it's easy to understand in its current form..  sigh.

> A crazy idea of my own:  maybe it'd be best to end the language wars once 
> and for all by introducing low-level code access and writing the compiler 
> in the DB.  From my inspection of the server code, ColdMUD's string 
> operations seem efficient enough for this, unlike those of L-----M--.  
> One could even use a buffer and decomplicate the structure considerably.
> 
> This way, if you don't like the language, you could conceivably modify or 
> replace it.  If you get crazy with this, it could get confusing, but then 
> noone will program anything cool at your site and you get what you 
> deserve.  :)

You can do this already, just change the parser code and recompile the server.
This is actually the kind of thing I'd like to avoid, tho, because it means
that no two ColdMUDs are likely to be able to use the same code, effectively
castrating any porting potential or collaboration between systems.  Personally,
I'd rather have everything stay the way it is than "progress" in such a
potentially disastrous direction (that's why I'm discussing all of this here
instead of just going ahead and making my own changes).

-R
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