Looking for suggestions/advice

[Dan Shafer]

Being the Resident Curmudgeon (self-described and not universally  
acclaimed), I figured I'd jump in with another viewpoint or two.

First, let me say I think this project could definitely be done well  
in Rev. I haven't seen anything in your requirements or this  
discussion that leads me to believe otherwise. That said, I think  
your performance concerns may be valid on some level. I don't think  
you need to (or necessarily should) conceive of your script  
interpreter as a nested ball of if-then-else or CASE statements. I  
think a table-driven approach might be far better, given Rev's  
ability to deal with 2-D arrays and strings. So I'd see a data  
structure like:

doplay,playTheGame,param1, param2
doscore, calcScore, param1, param2, param3

Then your code just locates the right line/row of the data structure  
to find out what command to call and everything else on the line is  
parametric data. I'm sure I'm probably oversimplifying here, but  
perhaps my point is clear anyway.

Two other things occur.

First, at the risk of causing a firestorm here, REALBasic includes a  
full-blown script interpreter, RBScript, that might completely avoid  
the need for writing your own scripting language interpreter. To be  
sure, development in RB is probably substantially slower than in Rev,  
but for an Open Source project, it has some advantages that are  
probably self-evident. Being object-oriented and given your  
experience with Python, you might find yourself quite at home in that  
world.

Second, if you do decide to do an interpreter, check out YACC (Yet  
Another Compiler Compiler) at http://dinosaur.compilertools.net/ 
yacc/ . The tool may or may not be useful to help you generate what  
you need here but I bet it'll help you think about your needs in a  
more structured way.

Good luck with the project. Sounds like fun.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolution Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
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