Extending Games With Lua 55
RealDSmooth writes "2old2play.com has a nice article up about extending World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, and other games using Lua, a light-weight programming language made specifically for enhancing and extending games. It goes into some great details about what's available today, and where Lua is heading in the future."
How About Scheme? (Score:3, Insightful)
``I wouldn't think of using anything else to extend a program.''
I'd just like to propose Scheme as an alternative to consider. Scheme has all the characteristics you applaud: great design, immense flexibility, and low footprint. Comparing Scheme to Lua:
- Scheme is a Lisp dialect, and, as such, uses s-expressions (basically lists, think lots of parentheses). Some people find this annoying, but it makes the syntax very regular and easy to parse.
- Scheme has a reader that reads s-expressions and a writer that writes them. This is convenient for reading and writing data, but (since Scheme programs are built of s-expressions) also allows easy processing of program code.
- Scheme offers macros which can be used to extend the syntax of the language. Few other languages offer these; it seems to go together with the parentheses (things like C macros are nowhere near as great)
- Scheme is standardized, and there are many implementations; anything from simple interpreters to complete IDEs and high-performance compilers
- Scheme is old, and therefore less prone to the incompatible changes that seem to plague more modern languages
- Scheme has first-class continuations, which I believe Lua doesn't have. In a nutshell, first-class continuations allow you to break the call-return control flow; you can return as many times as you like, or not at all. This is a very flexible feature, which can be used to implement certain things very concisely and elegantly.
- Standard Scheme does not contain structures or objects as found in other languages. Many Scheme implementations support these, or allow one to implement support using macros, but programs that use these features won't be completely compatible with all Scheme implementations.
- Scheme is used extensively in programming language and compiler research. It's also used to teach programming in a number of universities. Scheme is covered in various books, many of which can be read online.
I think that about sums it up. Note that I'm not saying anything is wrong with Lua, I'm just pointing out that Scheme is worth looking into, as well.
For more information, schemers.org [schemers.org] is a good place to start.