OK, people, let's get a little bit more specific here... Saying that scripting would be cool, attract more users etc is fine, but doesn't help to design a bot. I noticed that in the other threads as well, there is a lot of very interesting discussion going on, but everything is too abstract, no examples, no design proposals (I mean class-wise)... I don't know if it's just me, but I feel that we could be going on like that for months without any clear decisions and any real progress.
So, back to scripting. Is it slow? Yes, obviously much slower than C-code, but that shouldn't be a problem if you use it for high-level AI only. So don't worry about that. Second: Which language/interpreter? I wrote my own, which took me about one day, maybe two, and I could probably write an interpreter for any regular Chomsky language you could conceive. If there are scripting standards (Small, or whatever the name) and libraries for it, even better. I didn't know any scripting language when I wrote my code and just wanted to give it a try to see how scripting worked with XML, just out of curiousity...
But before discussing about languages, you need to know what exactly you would like to script and what constructs you need for it.
I set up this example goal file in the PIA-code, and although it's XML everybody should be able to understand it (come on, there are comments
). I'm still waiting for some specific feed-back on the approach: Would it work for your bot? Does it impose restrictions you cannot tolerate? Is it too complex? Is it the type of "high-level AI" you have in mind or is it completely different? If it is, post some examples of your ideas of alternative scripting languages (it would help immensely if you had an idea of how interpreters work and which constraints you have to take care of here)... Let's get these design discussions a bit more realistic, implementation-wise.