IMNSHO, strong typing is only useful in languages that have either a powerful type system such as Ada or Haskell, or a strong OOP system like C#. C and C-derived languages, however, don't and so I'd rather have a language with dynamic typing such as Python and Lua over them.

Why? consider the following example:

Will that compile? yeah. Will that run? yep. Will that produce something coherent? no freakin' way unless they added 293 days to December last time I looked. With a powerful type system however, you could define "day" as an integer between 1 and 31 (which would still leave us with February 31 but even so), a month as a member of a specific enumeration and year, well, it depends on the range and precision your program must handle, and how picky the compiler is can be determined by you, the programmer, when designing the program.

But of course, such a system would be grossly overkill for making mods, IMNSHO again, so I still support Python.

@legaceez:

Lua is more or less the one of the great standard scripting langages for games (and applications too). The biggest Lua example in user numbers is WoW. Civ IV is Python (Civ V switched to Lua) I think but Minecraft is modded in Java.

 "fortran 77"

Why not cobol, or Turbo Basic. There is turbo in the name, it sure runs fast.

My programming experience is basically in C style language: C, C++, PHP, Basic and Visual Basic. The biggest c++ project I did was "Wizardry Legacy", and I think I lost most of I hair on that project. I was doing object oriented programming, but not realy using the C++ classes. I ended the project more than 5 years ago, so things could have changed.

The biggest problem I had were:

A) Memory management: pointers and reference always seemed to create bug. I remember making a megaman clone with dynamically allocated object for the sprite and when I pushed a button to shoot my first bullet (which get's allocated on the spot and destroyed when it exits the screen) the game simply crashed.

B ) Type casting: I was probably doing it wrong. I had a base class "item" and derived class "weapon", "Armor", "Shield", etc which inherited from "item". So if I was managing Items, I simply used "Item" class references and pointers, but let say I needed to stats of a "weapon", I needed to cast my pointer to "weapon" to be able to read the stat. There was also many warning given for typing that even I had a hard time to figure out. In the end, I just randomly added and remove * until the compiler stopped complaining.

So when I learned PHP, I was amazed that all the variables management was now of the past and that I could finally code in peace. I also take a look at C# and was also amazed of all the new features they added to finally overcome all the problems with C++. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an open source compiler.

 "There are libraries that help with this. Lots of them. Even some that provide a garbage collector like those in scripting langauges."
 

Wow! Where were you 5 years ago?
 

 "Whitespace is merely objectionable; it is dynamic typing that is the real evil."
 

I never programmed in python like language and indeed I was surprised by the white space. As for dynamic typing, I don't know the real impact except for mispelling a variable. As for Lua, it seems similar to Visual basic. Still, there is probably good reasons why lua was created after python, I image it was probably to solve issues in python. As for angel script, it looks good because it has a C syntax, but I'll have to check it in details to know how good it is.

I agree that the modding should be done in 3 levels: XML -> Script -> DLL. Since the C language is not acessable to everybody. But a scripting language that has a C syntax is not bad except for a few operators which are not intuitive like "&&" and "||".

I only hope that the modding system will be very flexibile, and if I can create a new game of my own in little time, I would be more than happy.

I hope for the best

For the logical operators (&&, ||, ^^, and !), AngelScript has non-special symbol equivalents (and, or, xor, and not; repectively). Both are valid and do the same thing.

I would highly disagree with this statement. If you actually compare the list of game supporting Python v. those supporting Lua, you find that games tend to use Lua much more often than Python. However, this is not the same for non-game applications which seem to prefer Python to Lua. Honestly, of your examples, WoW uses a mix of Lua and XML for scripting and Mine Craft uses java. While Civ IV did use python, it also gave extensive C++ support, and as previously noted,Civ V switched to Lua and C++.

@legaceez:

I'm pretty much isolated from the WoW scene. Only interaction is having corrected some friends AddOn scripts. Looking at Python modding on WoW whom I never knew existed it seems it is an external component that needs to be installed by the user or in some cases the AddOns actually install a working Python runtime at install time. Only reason for that I can fathom is the non-sandboxed operations that can be achieved. Not exactly a plus from a security standpoint. It is moderately ingenious but also makes me remember the saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer you will see every problem as a nail.

Some scripting langauges do support dynamically compiling and executing commands. One of the samples of how to use AngelScript provided in the SDK is a console app that lets the user enter commands that call functions from a script file loaded on start up. I think Python comes with an app like this so it should be do able there too.

Edit:

http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/sdk/docs/manual/index.html

AngelScript comes with a function that does most of the work; all that would be needed would be to feed it the command.

I prefer Python because it has better support for Crunchy Frog and Holy Hand Grenade libraries.

I haven't used Python for 10 years (and didn't like it then) and I've never used LUA, but I think LUA would be a better choice for two reasons :

• First, the syntax with the white spaces in front of Python code will drive insane a lot of developers (beginners or veterans) who are not used to it, me included!
• Second, most of the games nowadays (the biggest being World of Warcraft) use LUA. There is now a huge modding community knowing LUA and to my (admittedly inexperienced) eyes, it seems that LUA is becoming the standard in the gaming industry for modding language.

Beside that, being a C/C++/C# developer, I strongly support the possibility of using C++ to develop mods as well. Frogboy, were you thinking of using some sort of virtual machine to run C++-like scripts or to allow for linking libraries written in C++?

And just for kidding, I will add some weight for the Fortran 77 support. Nothing like some common blocks declarations with different types of data to make the youngsters realize how nice modern languages are.

my drop of water would be a bias toward LUA,

but my smart suggestion would be BOTH, so that modders can work in which ever they are most comfortable in as long as it does NOT cause slowdowns, graphics glitches or memory leaks.

harpo

Well, then I shouldn't say anything as I'm unfamiliar with both, but I'll just chime in like most others

In my opinion the main question should be "Which language makes modding easier ?".

Going by most posts, and by the comparing the numbers linked by Heavenfall in reply#1, I'd tend toward Lua.

Also 

which sounds like it's made for modding, giving a natural way to say "my object is like this standard object,except ..." - but I'll defer to those fluent in Lua to say whether it is as easy as it sounds.

I also think performance is a red herring - there's work underway to make the python VMs faster.

But if this

comes true, I'd like to support the suggestion ...

Basically, I'd like to call for a C(++) API that makes it easy to integrate a scripting engine. I'd suggest that the official interpreter be integrated via this API, and that this integration be available in source code to show how it is done.

PS: I hate the quoting system - and the forum needs a preview  

All of these langauges allow C/C++ stuff to be bound to the interpreter for use in scripts, so all that would be needed is away for the 'other' langauges to bind wrappers for their scripts to the 'main' interpreter. Or in simpler terms it makes it look like the stuff from its scripts are really native code. The main issue would be getting the scripts loaded by the proper interpreter. If they choose to make this possibe (it will require things to be structured to support it) then the choice of langauge would come down to the one best able to interface with the others.

The one that is most likely to have issues is Lua, as it could be difficult to add script objects/class as such.

Note:

Likely the interpreter of the primary scripting langauge would be used to access the functions form DLLs anyways. This is because calling functions with unknown (at compile/build time) parameters is kind of trick; especially if you want to avoid using assembly. And the interpreter will have all the needed code pre-made, which would keep Stardock from having to redo that work.

Edit:

The problem with Lua would come if Stardock wants to pass game objects to script functions and allow access to the engine's data. It could still be done, but it would be harder and make things more difficult for the other interpreters.

Of course, having had more time to think about it creating wrappers for functions unknown at run-time is problematic. The simple way would be needed is an interpreter that can take 'function objects'* and have them used as functions. I do not think any of these interpreters support that kind of thing. The other option would be to provide the ability to register a dynamically generated a wrapper function in the main interperter's langauge.

* A block of data that can be used as a function.