If "scripting community is dying" - and I'd question this assertion as well - how could a "standalone" interpreter make a difference?
The vast majority of mIRC scripts are made to react to events on IRC networks and/or to manipulate/extend the GUI features of the client.
So does the scripting language MSL: The
major part of it deals with either:
- IRC-related commands, identifiers and events (DCC stuff emerges from chat encounters)
- client-related commands, identifiers and events (for the most part: GUI-related).
To put it different; what's left of MSL in a standalone interpreter (who is neither connected to an IRC network nor running a GUI)?
Imho verry little. Compared to other languages, MSL isn't very powerfull, isn't very coherent, and has countless quirks / limitations (just two examples: the "double spaces issue", the "single-thread bottleneck").
And that's nothing to blame Khaled for; MSL never was meant to be a fully-fledged programming language for "standalone" tasks. It's a toolkit of the client for the client - take the client away and you have a petty set of options remaining.
If compared to other programming languages, MSL isn't just incredibly simple but incredibly easy. That's why I love it. However, if you want to do programming "beyond mIRC" imho you should go for one of the many well-established, fully-fledged languages who hasn't been made with a single application in mind.
...my two cents, maybe I don't see the whole picture yet
