[Ohrrpgce] Improvement to plotstrings

[Ralph Versteegen]

On 4 March 2018 at 00:49, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 3 March 2018 at 17:07, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>
>> This sounds good to me.
>>
>> I think I like ?"literal" best. Its short, and although every option has
>> the potential to be confusing, I feel like that is the least confusing. If
>> some day years from now I am helping somebody debug a script that mixes
>> old-style plotstrings and plotstring literals with new real strings and
>> string expansion codes, I feel like ?"" will be easier to tell apart at a
>> glance from $"" than the other options thus far.
>>
>
> But the use of ? is inexplicable.
> I considered @"literal" earlier and discarded it, but on second thoughts
> it could be a good choice. @ produces the ID of a script or global
> variable, and here it would be the ID of a string literal. What I didn't
> like at first is that I want to extend @scriptname to return a callable
> function object, not just a script ID, like so:
>   subscript, squareof, x (...)
>   func := @squareof
>   show value(func(10))
> However, @globalname would still return an ID, and in all three cases @ is
> returning a handle (to a constant object, even)
>
Err, actually if you use it on a subscript you get a closure, not a
constant.


> so I guess it's not a false commonality. They are three different things,
> so @ isn't single operator, but maybe it's better to use the same syntax
> for similar semantics than invent a unique syntax in each case.
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 6:28 PM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> ==Informationless introduction==
>>>
>>> Currently, the animation system uses strings for animation and variant
>>> names, and I'm thinking of using names for other things as well:  handle
>>> points ("hand", "handle", "stand") and sequence points ("attack", "hit").
>>> I'm not 100% decided, but I think it would probably be best to use
>>> strings in scripts as well rather than ID numbers (like slice lookup codes)
>>> since that requires name editors, new lumps, enums for special names,
>>> id->string tables for those enums, plotscr.hsd constants, hsi export code,
>>> and maybe another script like misc/sl_lookup.py to keep it all in sync.
>>> Which is a lot more complexity than just using strings!
>>>
>>> So you would write something like
>>>   play animation(sl, $0="walk")
>>>
>>> Also, I was looking through my code for Carcere Vicis, which uses a
>>> preprocessor to spit out HamsterSpeak code, which let me write stuff like:
>>>    say($"as you drink the", item, $"your whole body starts to tingle")
>>> (This expands to $NS="as you drink the", etc, where NS is a 'new string'
>>> script)
>>> Just making it easy to write string constants solves one of the biggest
>>> problem with plotstrings.
>>>
>>> ==Proposals==
>>>
>>> I think we should add special syntax which is like $...="..." but
>>> doesn't require manually specifying a string ID:
>>> -it returns the ID number for a special immutable string, which can be
>>> passed to other string commands
>>> -the engine assigns a string ID >= 100, so that it doesn't clash with
>>> manually allocated string IDs. It searches existing strings >= 100 for one
>>> with the desired value, and otherwise increases the number of strings,
>>> creating a new one. Strings are not garbage collected. No GC is not a
>>> problem, because you can't create more strings than exist in your script
>>> source code
>>> -the string can't be modified, as that would break other uses of the
>>> same ID. Passing to any script command doing so is an error.
>>> -strings >= 100 are saved in saves, just like other strings
>>> -the actual ID assigned to a particular string constant varies between
>>> different plays, but you will never hardcode an ID >= 100 into your scripts
>>> -maybe it shouldn't be displayable with showstringat, etc. This isn't
>>> necessary, but the intention is to use these as literals, not full-blown
>>> plotstrings. Maybe we should just allow all that, though?
>>>
>>> Call these plotstring literals. This is a temporary solution until we
>>> have real string literals; they will become obsolete.
>>> Therefore we can't just use "..." syntax; they're very different.
>>>
>>> As I mentioned before, I want to have a way to expand embed codes in
>>> strings immediately, and allow you to use names of local variables too. The
>>> syntax I'm leaning towards is to prefix the string with $, like
>>>   msg := $"${hp}"
>>> It's not the easiest to type, but the relationship to $-prefixed embed
>>> codes seems good. But there are many other options, like python 3's
>>> f"${hp}". Any other suggestions?
>>>
>>> If we're using $"..." for that, then it can't be used for plotstring
>>> literals.
>>>
>>> We could use something like $="..." or $?"..." or $$"..." to indicate
>>> the similarity to $...="...". But the close similarity of these to $"..."
>>> seems confusing.
>>> So maybe something different, like ?"...".
>>>
>>> Also, we should add $== as a shorthand for stringcompare. stringcompare
>>> is horribly verbose.
>>> Also, if hspeak sees you write something like
>>>   if(str == $?="")
>>> then it can throw an error and tell you to use $== instead. Note that
>>> comparing two plotstring literals with == will work, but comparing a
>>> plotscripting literal to a mutable plotstring won't!
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
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