Channel Elements -- too many attacks?

[darkgod]

1) yes we agree, carriage returns are whitespaces. But .. mh lua does not rely on them .. not at all. You can write all yoru code on one line if you fancy

2) mh

3) Limits being ?

4) Now you're trying to tell me that because you cant botehr to learn a new language somebody should go to some lengths to write a converter for a much less pwoerfull language(C) ? No converter in the world could make smart use of lua niceness, beacuse they just dont exists in C. Now please learn lua or stop throwing silly arguments

[Atarlost]

I don't care about LUA niceness. I'd rather be able to do what I want and have the spell cost and failrate info stored somewhere else as they used to be before this LUA fad started than have everything in one place but not be able to do what I want without several lines of fiddling with temporary variables because I can't string together operators because I need one that LUA doesn't have.

[Neil]

Atarlost: Was that supposed to make any sense at all?

The only thing I took out of that big block of rambling was that you think it's *good* to store different attributes of spells in different places?

[Atarlost]

No, It's not *BAD* compared to the PITA that complicated conditional statements become in LUA.

[Neil]

I already gave an example of a conditional above. It's virtually identical with C.

You lose. Find some other excuse to complain, as this one has no credibiltiy.

[Atarlost]

Can you translate these concisely?

Code: Select all

if ((o_ptr->k_idx) &&
	    (!artifact_p(o_ptr)) && (!ego_item_p(o_ptr)) &&
	    (!broken_p(o_ptr)) && (!cursed_p(o_ptr)))

Code: Select all

if ((r_ptr->flags1 & (RF1_UNIQUE)) ||
			    (r_ptr->level > randint((dam - 10) < 1 ? 1 : (dam - 10)) + 10))

What about this statement?

Code: Select all

msg_format("%sour %s (%c) %s destroyed!",
				           ((o_ptr->number > 1) ?
				            ((amt == o_ptr->number) ? "All of y" :
				             (amt > 1 ? "Some of y" : "One of y")) : "Y"),
				           o_name, index_to_label(i),
				           ((amt > 1) ? "were" : "was"));

[Neil]

First one's easy: just use "and" instead of "&&". In fact, lua requires one fewer levels of parentheses in that if.

Second two are examples of poorly-written C, so any example of poorly-written lua would be their equal.

[Nerdanel]

The C example #1 doesn't need all those parentheses.

No comment to the actual subject.

[Atarlost]

Tell that to Ben Harrison.

[Jules]

Well readability of operators is subjective. An operator becomes readable and intuitive when you read it enough.

BenH liked (grokked, indeed) the ? operator and used it a lot. It is, however, in my opinion a fairly small problem. I use it occasionally in C, I don't find it hard to program without it. You could implement it in lua if you wanted to as a function, and just possibly as an overloaded operator with some considerably ingenuity.

Much more interesting are first-class functions with closures. Now that's a programming tool.

There's plenty about LUA that's suboptimal, speaking as someone who only learnt it 3 weeks ago and has been hacking in the ToME code since. But first-class functions and tables are entirely sufficient, IMO, to make it a better programming language for ToME scripts than C.

[Atarlost]

If someone would implement the trinary conditional operator for LUA I'd stop or at least dramatically curtail my complaining. I still don't like the way it does code blocks (no {..}s) but my biggest complaint is the lack of the ? operator.

[darkgod]

I'm sorry but if you ask somebody who never coded what {} means and what then ... end or do ... end means. I'm sure the lua way will get more right anwsers.

Code: Select all

if (foo)
{
...
}
else
{
....
}

Code: Select all

if foo then
...
else
...
end

See it even looks better in Lua, less used lines

[Atarlost]

I find the {} notation easier to read. I also find having the ()s surrounding conditionals helpful. As I said, however, my main beef is the lack of a ? operator.

[Tachyon]

Look Atarlost, this is getting annoying. Yes, having the game crash because you forgot to put in the "}" is definitely irritating - at least in my opinion - but the C vs. Lua argument has really gone too far. Yes, Lua can be a little annoying, but it really is quite similar to C.

Oh, and sorry about saying that Lua is (shudder) almost as bad as basic, I was annoyed because my game had crashed about 3 times when I tried to fix that geomancy bug I described earlier and forgot to add a 2 commas and a "}".

[Atarlost]

I shouldn't have mentioned curly braces.

My main problem is with the lack of a trinary conditional operator. Jules implies it could be implemented, but that would require someone who knows LUA and can work with the C code for LUA interpretation. There are people here who must know how to do that sort of thing, because they were able to implement the function hooks that do exist for ToME, but I am not one of those people.