Re: Lua code objects

[Scott Rutledge <srutledg@...>]

I've been playing with that idea for a while now. I'm working on a game
that has an in-game editor, and was looking for a way to allow the level
designers easy access to the lua code of the scripting engine. I was
thinking something along the lines of good old-fashioned muds: a database
of objects which users can create, destroy, and edit on the fly, and have
the engine be able to save and load the entire database as source
code.
This could get really messy quickly, so I was thinking of keeping it
simple. The concept would be a thin layer of wrapper functions that takes
a table name, index, and string of source to assign to that table and
index. The layer would do the actual assignment, as well as dump the
source to a structured file of some sort (XML, ini-style, whatever).
There would also have to be calls to handle the addition and removal of
tables from the database, which would make the relevant changes to the
source file.
I thought about wrapping dofile, but that would involve manually parsing
out the code, which I'd rather leave to lua itself.
I'd be willing to help work on a library to support this. Sort of on the
topic, had anyone been crazy enough to make an XML parser for lua?

Scott Rutledge

At 05:52 PM 26/02/2001 +0000, Nick Trout wrote:
> Good day
> one and all. I was wondering if anyone had had any thoughts about
> treating Lua code as an object so that you can play with it and use it
> interactively. I think this was mentioned a while ago but nor followed
> up?
>  
> Off the top of my head... I was thinking of
> having a Lua class called "_Code". You make an instance of this
> and instead of using dofile() you call _Code:dofile() for things you want
> to keep, edit, recompile and save. When you use _Code:dofile(), it reads
> your file, parses it and executes it. The class remembers the source code
> of the code executed and if you want to edit something you can go to
> _Code and retrieve it. You then edit it and return it to _Code which
> executes it and can save it for you. _Code could also supply you with a
> table containing all the editable stuff available. Ergo, you have code
> editing mungojiggery. This could perhaps be a wrapper for the debug
> interface?
>  
> Any thoughts please?
>  
> Cheers,
> Nick
>
> ---
> Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
> society.
> Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
>  
>