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Re: Xconq language thoughts
On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 01:55:48AM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Almost nobody is interested in writing AI in C. Some will want to do
> C++, "for the performance." Others, like myself, find C++ to be a poor
> fit to the AI tasks they want to implement. People like that pick
> Python or some other higher level language.
i fear i have to concur with Brandon on this....
see below...
> One question is how much coding is needed to get an AI going. It's not
> enough to have a separable layer. It must be a *doable* layer.
one good point...
> > I don't actually buy that reasoning. Programmers who are really
> > interested are
> > willing to key in machine code using toggle switches if they have to;
i am giving C++ and Java courses among others, and i took down a IBM -
JAVA project of a robot battle arena. The students got all exited over
it, and are now happily playing with it producing lots of different ai's
to control those battle bots.....
strong of that experience i dug out a similar project in C++ for the
same named course.... and it was a big flop....
the difference?
the java projects proposes a full blown set of allreading and very
easily usable primiteves that you only need to plug together to get a
first bot running, whilst the C++ bots needs a hell of programming to
get just the basic parts working....
as often you encounter the paradigm: you use C/C++? then you are
qualified to do things the hard way... you use Java (same goes for
python BTW) then you are considered stupid enough to be given
powerfull ready tools into your hands....
ergo: we need not only a good abstraction layer defined through a set of
interfaces, we need also easy to use and combinable basic actions to
attract people into that area...
and concerning touching the code: i tryed several times to dig into
xconq sources, but allways managed to break things at different
parts.... so mee too i would really prefer a true OO design to all
this... encapsulation is nice ;)
--
ciao bboett
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bboett@adlp.org
http://inforezo.u-strasbg.fr/~bboett
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