Re: [Celestia-developers] shatters.net is down

[Fridger S. <t0...@ma...>]

Chris Laurel wrote:
> 
> This doesn't belong on the developers list, but I wanted to get the word out that shatters.net is down.  It looks like the site was hacked.  The OS crashed and the system was left in an unbootable state.  There was no data loss, but I'm
> not sure when I'll have the site up and running again.  I guess I need to be
> more diligent about updates . . .  Ugh.
> 
> --Chris
> 

What a horror! If only I could see what these guys are gaining by doing this.
Two days ago, a colleague's cluster with lots of invaluable scientific data was
hacked, too, leaving the system disks in a very "neat" status: all FAT's and
/all/ tracks with copies thereof were cleanly filled with 0's...

...

> 
> I've been looking into improving scripting for Celestia and came across a 
> language called Lua: www.lua.org
> 
> It's designed to be an embeddable interpreter . . .  The syntax is 
> straightforward, the interpreter is small, and the license is apparently 
> compatible with the GPL.  Years ago, I worked with using Tcl as an 
> embedded scripting language, but the syntax of Lua looks much nicer and it 
> has types other than strings.
> 
> Has anyone worked with Lua before?  Is this worth pursuing as an 
> alternative to the existing script system?  Or are there better embedded 
> interpreters?
> 
> --Chris
> 

I looked at the stucture of lua a little bit. Looks professionally done.
Personally, I have no particular preferences as to the scripting language for
Celestia, except that it should have a clean logical structure and be
embeddable into C/C++. 

Two aspects, though: 

It /must/ be user friendly eventually. Elegance on the developer level seems
less important to me. Javascript might be too complex for many users. Notably
after reading again the request of a forum user, yesterday, asking about how to
edit text files under Windows;-). 

In this context, there is a fancy platform being developed since quite a while
at CERN/Geneva, specializing on graphical analysis of data in particle physics
("root"). The scripting language is /interpreted C++/. Despite the amazing
power of this package, it is not really taking off, since the  commands appear
too complex even for a fair fraction of physicists who are not familiar (yet)
with C++...(The reason for the latter is the lack of lots of specialized libs
notably for our typical huge number crunching tasks, rather than a 
conservative attitude of the physicists involved;-))
 
The second aspect, I keep mentioning is that all commands involving timings
should involve a /foolproof/ handshaking protokoll!

Bye Fridger