Forums Developers Are there plans to support other scripting langs?

Hello,

I wonder if mIRC will allways support mIRC scripting
(will it be expanded and in what ways?) or will you
start supporting anything similar to javascript and
abandon the extraordinary syntax and stuff?

I'm talking about version 7.0 and year 2006 - far future plans.

Don't you think a more common syntax and familiar techniques
would be good for the developers (scripters) community?

thanx

Hey there,

It is a commonly known fact that it's very rare for Khaled to release information on what will or may appear in future versions of mIRC. Whilst some "major" features have been commented on, for example UTF-8 Unicode is on his To Do list as he has posted this, I have seen nothing about supporting other scripting languages from Khaled. Personally, I feel it's unlikely.

I think it has been suggested before, try using the Search feature and search the 'Feature Suggestions' forum. If you find nothing with several search combinations, perhaps it's worth posting the suggestion yourself?

Regards,

Wouldn't be that hard. All you'd have to do is use languages dll files the same way Xchat uses the .so files.

I don't know if it's a matter of difficulty, I didn't suggest that. It could be a number of reasons. Perhaps Khaled thinks (and I agree with this point) that it would cause too much confusion for people. Perhaps it could not easily be integrated into the GUI without looking too complicated. Perhaps he just thinks it would look plain lame and doesn't like the idea, therefore, he's not going to include it? Who knows.

Fact is, introducing something like this to a client as popular as mIRC would have massive repercussions (good and bad I suppose) on the IRC community as a whole. For example, there are many mIRC scripting help channels. They would then have to decide whether to help with other languages too. What's more, how much support would be available for these languages? Imagine how much would need to be added to the help file...or perhaps no support in the help file would exist? You'd need more forums, perhaps, to be created for help with other scripting languages. Scripting websites would perhaps need to support even more scripts.

And anyway, mIRC is a chat program...all this fuss over scripting languages blah blah and for what? mIRC scripting is more than capable of doing what mIRC is meant to do, and more.

That's the way I see it anyway..

Regards,

Well... would this really be a problem? Those help channels are usually more like workshops, aren't they? So there's just two things possible, either someone who knows about that certain language is on the channel, or nobody who knows it is on the channel. Isn't it the same for DLLs, actually?



If Khaled for example decided to add Perl, TCL, C or Java support (in a way that a function or method from a script or shared object or class could be 'attached' to mIRC as an event handler), the documentation part would be the least issue, I think.

Also, if this was a semi-supported or unsupported feature, most people could live with that, I guess.



I agree. I consider mIRC scripting language to be sufficient for most of the tasks which can be thought of regarding IRC issues.

But if mIRC supported additional languages, there's --except for the fact that Khaled had to spend time for this-- no real problem about it, is it? Perl e.g. is a very powerful language for doing text manipulation. I probably won't ever really need that, but it might just be nice-to-have for some people.

On the flip side of this, what about using mIRC scripting language outside of the mIRC environment?

Considering the significant number of scripts these days that don't actually interact with the IRC server, it would be more than feasible for them to work independently outside of mIRC.

So basically, a compiler would be needed... just don't ask me to make one .

Your thoughts?

Actually i dont think there is anything extraordinary about MIRC scripts anyway to even think of using a plugin. You know one scripting language and you'll pick up mirc scripting in no time. Less than 24 hours including remotes and aliases.
Anyway the syntax not obfuscated, although there are limitations. I use Perl scripts on MIRC actually. Actually just one of my scripts runs using perl. Using /run. You can basically code anything from any language and write to a text file and just make the client do the reading. It's a bit slower, but i guess it's enough. Just my two cents

Creating a compiler for a 'proper' scripting language is a very difficult thing to do. Creating one for mIRC script would most likely be even harder. mIRC's lack of quoted strings, while suited to the command-line/IRC syntax environment of mIRC makes it extremely difficult to work with strings properly. Really I can't even fully explain the reasons why what you're asking isn't going to happen. Comparing mIRC scripting with other interpreted langauges is an apples & oranges situation, they're two very different things. mIRC's langauge is a scripting langauge for a program, so 90% of it has no meaning outside of the context of IRC and mIRC.

BerSirc supports mircscript

Yes but that's just anoter IRC client so it's basically the same thing. It's a world apart from mIRC scripting being used as a standalone language.

I was just thinking, for many such as myself who learnt mIRC scripting prior to any "proper" language, it would be very useful in helping one's development of the knowledge of programming. I found mIRC scripting very simple to pick up, but having then moved on to proper languages, in my case C was the next language I learnt, I learnt very slowly. Having mIRC scripts in their own running environment would also be pretty nifty - if you create a media player, you can show it to people who don't have mIRC, so they can be amazed at your work. Or not, as the case may be...

I think anyone going straight from mIRC scripting to C will find the going tough. mIRC scripting was one of the first languages I ever learnt, from there I went through a bunch of high-level languages before moving on to C. It's a lot easier to pick up C if you progress through several intermediary languages. Check out Python, PHP, or perhaps Ruby, you'll probably find them a lot easier to get to grips with since they're more of a step up in complexity and power from mIRC scripting, whereas C is one giant leap. After you've used one of those languages for a month or two I think you'll agree that there's really no need for mIRC scripting to become some kind of standalone language.