Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post

Yazracor · 04-08-2003, 02:39 PM

Well, the security issue vanishes totally if you do not allow your builders to add scripting-code online but only after one of the implementors has checked the scripts (the approach we take), or have a separate building port as in many LPC-muds. The security issues are very much the same if you use MProgs, with MProgs having many drawbacks: Among a few are no "clean" syntax, no looping constructs, no variables. Add to this, that MProgs are difficult to maintain, because they offer no direct access to the data structures of the MUD, making it necessary to add new if-checks and mob-commands on a regular basis.
Basically, they're a nice little tool for very small tasks, but as soon as a mobile's gets more complex than just walking around a bit, handing out the one or other item and having it say a few lines, they quickly become bloated and difficult to read and debug - using a full-blown scripting language will make a lot of tasks a lot easier there.
As for the compilation-issue, maybe I did not really get your point, but I do not really see any difficulties there, as the difference between compilation and interpretation is blurring more and more in modern languages. Most scripting languages are what one would classically call interpreted, but of course internally compile into some kind of byte-code which is then executed at far higher speed. Python, eg., offers a wide variety of options to execute code, ranging from instantiating a code-object over interpreting a string to executing a pre-compiled bytecode file. In addition, most of these languages offer very extensive bindings for at least C and Java, so there is comparatively little code that needs to be written to incorporate them.

04-08-2003, 02:39 PM	#9
Yazracor New Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 18	Well, the security issue vanishes totally if you do not allow your builders to add scripting-code online but only after one of the implementors has checked the scripts (the approach we take), or have a separate building port as in many LPC-muds. The security issues are very much the same if you use MProgs, with MProgs having many drawbacks: Among a few are no "clean" syntax, no looping constructs, no variables. Add to this, that MProgs are difficult to maintain, because they offer no direct access to the data structures of the MUD, making it necessary to add new if-checks and mob-commands on a regular basis. Basically, they're a nice little tool for very small tasks, but as soon as a mobile's gets more complex than just walking around a bit, handing out the one or other item and having it say a few lines, they quickly become bloated and difficult to read and debug - using a full-blown scripting language will make a lot of tasks a lot easier there. As for the compilation-issue, maybe I did not really get your point, but I do not really see any difficulties there, as the difference between compilation and interpretation is blurring more and more in modern languages. Most scripting languages are what one would classically call interpreted, but of course internally compile into some kind of byte-code which is then executed at far higher speed. Python, eg., offers a wide variety of options to execute code, ranging from instantiating a code-object over interpreting a string to executing a pre-compiled bytecode file. In addition, most of these languages offer very extensive bindings for at least C and Java, so there is comparatively little code that needs to be written to incorporate them.