Wanted: your top 5 ways to improve scripting

1. Any kind of crappy regex interface you feel like giving us
2. A very limited regex
3. A moderately limited regex
4. regex
...

Wow - old thread. Some good ideas/people, though...

hehehe

1) write to notecard
2) script inheritance/linking - change a script in inventory and have all objects using it get changes
3) structures and multi-dimentional arrays, or at least putting lists in lists. striding sucks.
4) better inter-object communications, at least something like IM within a sim.
5) more controls of linked prim attributes - llSetLinkTexture, llSetLinkPos, etc.

male/female/neuter/hermaphrodite/drone/incubator/whatever... your limited binary notion of gender is so mundane!

Well someone is still posting the occasional response. But I am beginning to suspect this is all misdirection/evasion. Misdirection in that there are much bigger problems with Havoc, imaging, prims and the general organization of SL than there are in LSL. Perhaps forget LSL upgrade and work on the real problems for a bit? Evasion in that what LSL upgrade ideas are posted here are met with 'Heres a way to code around that with only 20 more lines....', rather than buckling down to improving the efficiency of the language.
So, has any new feature come out of this yet?

Add persistent storage capability.

Well since someone woke the thread I'll add my two cents.

1) Ability to modify notecards in the host object's inventory. Perhaps a set of functions like those used for stream I/O on textfiles in C.

2) ARRAYS (functions to support stacks and queues would be cool to BTW ;> )

3) A type like STRUCTS

4) The CASE or SELECT like control structure

5) Some thing like the PARSE funtion found in REXX (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REXX#PARSE )

6) REGEX

There are 10 types of people in this world... Those that understand binary and those that do not.

suport for dialog based input via llDialog thus removing the need for people to learn complex command lines and long descriptive notecards on how to use the command line (Hiro's 1 prim vendor for example, not complaing about it, great code, just complex command lines). Even if the dialog could only request 1 piece of data at a time I think this would be invaluable. Or even a few pre-defined dialogs like that request either a string, int, float, or vector. The dialog itself can just pre-validate the data for the script. Something like:

  llDialogInputString(llGetOwner(),"Give me some string value:" , CHANNEL); 
 
  or

  llDialogInputInteger(llGetOwner(),"How old are you?", CHANNEL);

Make handling of linked objects in scripts saner. At the moment, dealing with linking and unlinking things dynamically is a bit of a nightmare, due to the link numbers constantly changing. For example, I have a game with pieces on a board that get linked. If some pieces gets taken, I have to send a linkmessage from the board to all the pieces saying 'if you're at this position, tell me your link number', then the board has to accumulate all the link numbers that come back, then sort them into a descending list and remove them in that order, to avoid removal of a lower link number then changing the higher link numbers. That's a lot of hoops to jump through to do something which should be quite simple.

So, things that would be nice - link numbers between given objects remaining constant, llCreateLink returning the newly created link number (as it won't always be 1 any more).

Or even just letting a child prim unlink itself from its parent without needing the PERMISSION_CHANGE_LINKS permission set up would help.

Of course, maybe I'm missing something and there's an easier way to do all of this ...

Jonathan

1) Object oriented features - class support, inheritance, user defined events, function and operator overloading
2) Replace LSL with a Java/C# style language, and move the functionality into supporting class libraries and namespaces(for example, System.Inventory.Give(), System.IO.Say, etc..)
3) More native data types
4) Improvements to the touch event, as noted many times in this thread.
5) Improvements to the sensor event (as noted many times in this thread).

Scripts that reference other scripts like .h helper files for classes and structs, ect.

shinmai

If what you are asking is implemented, llCreateLink will always return 2. When a new item is linked, it receives the link number 2, and all previous link's numbers are incremented.

Plus, what should llCreateLink return if the destination item has more then one primitive?
==Chris

1) A real caveman-debugging call, eg. llTrace(string), which outputs a message only to the owner (right now, IMs work, but the 2-second inter-delay can be stifling).

2) Get/set "away" mode (and related event)

3) Get/set "busy" mode (and related event)

That's it for now.

These would be ever so handy...

You have so many debugs you cant use IM? wow.

Well, I had for instance a complex string-manipulation sequence, for which I wanted to print the working copy at each step, to verify that it wasn't getting mangled; this would generate, say 3 messages in less than a second, but IMs have a 2-second interlock delay (spam prevention or whatever), which is annoying.

I guess, technically, in that case, I could predict the result using the ol' noggin, then compare the result to my prediction, and not even need debug output, but... it's nicer to see exactly where things go wrong sometimes.

Just an idea that came out of IRC ramblings...

A was to script motion or pose of Avatar:

llMoveAv(key av, integer joint, rot rotation);

1) Client-Side "Temporary" Code
2) llDetectedMass()
3) llSetLinkTexture()
4) llMoveToTargetNonPhysical() - smooth motion without physics overhead. Flag would be nice.
5) llPizza()

I second this motion.

Is this thread still active? Hehehe!
ok let's see...

1. Saving the script without having to compile it - Sometimes I just want to temporary save the script that i'm making without having to remove all the errors or place //'s
   
2. Saving to notecards would be nice
   
3. llParsePHPURL(string link) - dunno if it's named correctly, but I would love to have an easy way to save stuff to an online database. This would be simple to use, even for beginners.
   
4. llMoveToGround() - Make an object move to the closest prim or ground underneath it, I would rather have it as a build option.. but through script would be nice as well
   

This would be it for now, guess I don't have to many wishes for scripting. Though I can imagine some people do. The problem with most things though, like saving to a website or database or even writing to notecards, could be and probably will be abused. I could imagine a timer calling the llParsePHPUrl every 0.01 seconds, making an easy way to send an DOS attack.. Hmm.. maybe I should get that function off my list.
Ahhh I don't have to tell you this, you already know all of this

write to notecards
name to key
write to notecards
write to notecards
write to notecards

Thats been asked for many times - Not going to happen any time soon.

Notecards arn't like text files at all.

Well, this is just an idea, and coming from me (someone completely new here) it might seem a little half-baked or something, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

This seems to be a vibrant community. Why not use that community to help enhance the help system for the scripts?

The web page for your scripting help could be enhanced to include links from each of the functions to a web page bearing comments from the community. In this way, if there's something confusing about a specific function, you'd have a very intuitive and simple way to clear up the confusion, without having to devote a lot of resources.