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Lobster, a New Game Programming Language, Now Available As Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the hello-world dept.

Aardappel writes "Lobster is a new programming language targeting game programming specifically, building on top of OpenGL, SDL 2 and FreeType. The language looks superficially similar to Python, but is its own blend of fun features. It's open source (ZLIB license) and available on GitHub."

5 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. gag me with a shift button by decora · · Score: 5, Informative

    i := find([ 1, 2, 3 ]): _ > r

    yeah. no. thanks but no thanks.

    1. Re:gag me with a shift button by hedwards · · Score: 1, Informative

      It hides formatting information in whitespace, something that no sane person would do.

      It also ends lines at the new line rather than at a ;, which means that you're in a position where you can end up with long lines at times, where normally, you would just hit enter and continue on the next line.

      In general though, any language that depends upon white space for anything other than separating elements is just asking for trouble.

  2. Re:"Fun features"? by ameen.ross · · Score: 3, Informative

    In this case it is the submitter's pet project.

    --
    $(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
  3. Re:why dont we just use chinese characters? by dintech · · Score: 4, Informative

    Been there, done that. Look specifically at APL in the 60s. Functions were represented by single characters which you needed a special keyboard to type. For example, instead of typing the string floor, instead it was represented by what is now Unicode Character 'LEFT FLOOR' (U+230A) and required a special terminal to reproduce them. This limited where you could input and also display APL code.

    One evolution of APL was the A+ language leading finally to K in the 90s. Having these special character requirements was too much of a pain in APL so all special characters were replaced by tuples of ASCII characters that were already common. In K, 'floor' was now expressed as _: which is no easier to guess the meaning of if you don't know the syntax, but now you need only standard ASCII to represent it.

    'Son of K' was Q which comes full circle replacing _: with the keyword floor. Iverson's argument in developing APL was that the terseness achieved by using notoation (single characters) meant that you could express concepts more conciesely. This in turn meant that complex concepts were easier to visualise. There's a lot to be said for this, but I think Q now provides a much happier medium between the two perspectives.

  4. Re:fuck me slashdot cant display unicode by Xest · · Score: 3, Informative

    Amusingly this is somewhat the answer to your question - most programming languages will avoid unicode characters because it then runs a greater risk of transmission of code between systems because unfortunately there are still all too many applications, sites and programs that don't properly support unicode which means bugs could arise in source code for no reason other than loading it up, manipulating it, and saving it in the wrong text editor.

    But I agree, it's a sad state of affairs that we can't rely on the existence of unicode even now.