Re: Lua on iPhone

[Joshua Jensen <jjensen@...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Roberto Ierusalimschy
Date: 4/27/2010 10:07 AM
> > I can see it now: "You may only use .plist files for loading your
> > data, but you may not interpret that data in a way that would cause
> > it to call a callback in your application..."
> >      
> Do you know what that means?
>    
Other than being a joke, because the whole situation is ludicrous, I'm 
not sure what this all means.  If I use XML (or Apple's on .plist 
format) for my data formats and the parser reaches the Width and Height 
data, my code is written like so:

<Width>5</Width>

if (key == "Width")
    SetWidth(value);

I just wrote a scripting language!  I interpreted the XML data and had 
it call a function in my iPhone application!

As near as I can figure, the only way I can ship levels for a game is to 
embed them as raw C code in my application's executable, because the 
mere act of interpreting the data is bad.

Just to drive the point further home:

<HappyHappy>You'll love this...</HappyHappy>

if (key == "HappyHappy")
    FormatAllDataOnMyIpod();

Regardless, this is now off topic.

When I make my iPhone game, I will have a Lua binary data format, 
because using Lua for data is awesome (barring the number of constants 
limitation).  If they freak out over that, I'll write a custom reader 
for the Lua binary format that does the same thing as the existing Lua code.

Josh