Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Draco18s]

They are Removed (from the internal code) Automatic (-ally compiled) Widget (synonym for object - the more you know!) files

Reminds me of:
How RAW do you want your gaming rules?
(RAW = Rules As Written).

[Footkerchief]

The raws are not programs.

Mm, I don't know about that.  "Program" is not a very restrictive category.  Additionally the upcoming raws exhibit some features that you don't see much (ever?) in pure markup langauges, such as variable assignment/retrieval (for reaction reagents) and what amount to subroutines with argument passing (body detail plans).

[G-Flex]

They're not programs or scripts in any manner of speaking. All they do is store data to be interpreted by the program. They aren't meant to hold program instructions of any sort. Some of it's abstracted, sure, but it all still comes down to storage of data and nothing else.

[Footkerchief]

They're not programs or scripts in any manner of speaking. All they do is store data to be interpreted by the program. They aren't meant to hold program instructions of any sort. Some of it's abstracted, sure, but it all still comes down to storage of data and nothing else.

"Storage of data" is a really ambiguous phrase though.  Any data can be a program as long as the machine into which you feed it knows how to decode/run it.  And seriously, look at the VERTEBRATE_TISSUE_LAYERS body detail plan and its invocation in the creature def and tell me that doesn't look like a subroutine in a procedural language.

[CursedBurger]

They are Removed (from the internal code) Automatic (-ally compiled) Widget (synonym for object - the more you know!) files

And here I thought they were just "raw data", i.e. unprocessed...

[G-Flex]

They're not programs or scripts in any manner of speaking. All they do is store data to be interpreted by the program. They aren't meant to hold program instructions of any sort. Some of it's abstracted, sure, but it all still comes down to storage of data and nothing else.

"Storage of data" is a really ambiguous phrase though.  Any data can be a program as long as the machine into which you feed it knows how to decode/run it.  And seriously, look at the VERTEBRATE_TISSUE_LAYERS body detail plan and its invocation in the creature def and tell me that doesn't look like a subroutine in a procedural language.

It doesn't. It looks like a highly-abstracted way of representing data.

The fact of the matter is that all these files do is contain information meant to assign qualities to objects. It doesn't have or do anything beyond that. The program interprets it for the purpose of knowing which objects to create and which qualities out of a predefined set to attribute to them; it doesn't contain arbitrary instructions the way a script would.

[Footkerchief]

The fact of the matter is that all these files do is contain information meant to assign qualities to objects.

Well, yes.  I don't see how that makes them intrinsically different from "real programs" though.  I mean, even when you're writing object-oriented code directly, the keywords etc. are still just instructions for the compiler, which then generates its own output, and so on.  In your words, the compiler "interprets [the source code] for the purpose of knowing which objects to create and which qualities out of a predefined set [e.g. a type system] to attribute to them."  It may sound like I'm twisting your words, but they're very broad words.

it doesn't contain arbitrary instructions the way a script would.

I don't know what degree of arbitrariness is required here.  It's not Turing-complete, no, but my instinct is that you could achieve conditional logic with a little cleverness.

Here's a question: would SQL still be a scripting language if the only available command were INSERT?