Re: Scripts vs APIs

Kevin Goldsmith ([email protected])
Sun, 4 Sep 1994 23:48:07 -0700 (PDT)


>
> I am a very big fan of scripting languages generally, but I do not
> think that it it is desirable to build such a scripting language into VRML.
>
> What we should do is build an API - but make sure that we build an
> API that can be easily accessed by scripting language toolkits. The API
> should only know that another program/process communicates with it
> (two-way) via the API. Whether that other process/ program is a script
> interpreter or custom code should be irrelevent. It would be nice if
> scripting languages are kept in mind, so we should be passing strings
> rather than pointers or whatever where possible, nice high level data. Also
> reasonably high level commands.

VRML is not an API, it is a 3D description language. A toolkit
will be developed at some point to handle common VRML processing tasks.
A good way to handle that library (from a non-product point of view). Is
to wait until VRML has been around before and than grab the best
functions that people have lying around, rewrite so that they have a
common library and then release that as a VRML library to the net.

Kevin