"Christian" <christians / syd.microforte.com.au> writes:
[massive snipping]
> Python is 'safe' (inasmuch as the suits know about it), but
> personally I think Python is broken. Ruby seems a good alternative
> (hey, and wouldn't it be nice if Ruby can claim to be the basis for
> a large-scale game?). Then again, Ruby is typeless (in my world at
> least), and I fear letting a bunch of artists have at it without
> type.

An aside: I'm fairly new to Ruby, but it appeared to me that the type
models of Ruby and Python are very similar. In both languages, objects
are basically hash-tables of methods which can be queried and
augmented at runtime. Can anyone explain what the differences are?

Christian - if you're interested in type safety have a quick look at
Objective Caml ( http://caml.inria.fr/ ). It breaks apart subtyping
and subclassing so you can have, for example, an array of objects
which don't all inherit from a particular type, but must all support a
method foo (checked at compile time). I wouldn't recommend it as a
scripting language (novice users would be utterly baffled), but you
may find it an interesting point of comparison.

Cheers,

--
Edwin