>I've spent the last few years doing my best to refute (1) by building
>a counter-example.
This isn't quite what I was expecting by "counter-example". For them
as aren't familiar with BE, this is actually a full-fledged implementation
of a behaviour-through-objects system. (I had actually roamed through
the Behaviour Engine pages back when we were just starting this project,
but the pages had been quite light on detail at the time, and I'd
entirely forgotten about them.)
>(BTW, as of today there's a new chunk of technical detail at our site:
>see http://www.besoft.com/new/xobs.html)
Worth checking out -- there are some interesting ideas there.
Of course, now that you've stuck your neck out, I now want a *lot* more
detail here. The basic idea is intriguing, although it does sound like
it falls into one of the categories I'd listed before -- it essentially
embeds a second language inside of the main one, which I find a tad
inaesthetic. Still, some of the ideas *are* intriguing.
Can you provide more examples? The pages don't seem to present anything
concrete, just rough ideas of what the capabilities are. In particular,
I want a better understanding of how XOBs would be worked into a VRML
scene graph, and how they would interact with the objects therein. Also,
the material on references is *quite* dense, and desperately needs some
clarification -- having read through it, I still have only the vaguest
notion of what you're talking about there, and it's clearly quite central
to the notions underlying BE. In general, I think some really concrete
examples would be *very* helpful in grokking this material.
Also, do you have any timetable for the ASCII format of BEF? I suspect
that the window here is relatively small; I hope this discussion is
going to gear up quite steadily over the next couple of months. The
pages just say that this will be available in '95; I think we will
need to have our decision made well before the end of this year, and
this may be a factor.
I'm still not convinced that this is the way to go; in particular, I
still find embedding the code of one language inside another rather
ugly. But, at the least, there may well be some useful ideas here for
VRML behaviour. (Especially in the field of how the behaviour language
interacts with the objects, a critical question that we haven't really
even touched on yet.) I may yet start arguing for some sort of hybrid.
(Eg, Java as the language, but adapting the better BE ideas into it.)
We'll see; I need to understand BE better.
We should probably move this discussion over to just vrml-behaviors
for now, although there may be implications for the larger list if
we start following this path seriously...
-- Justin
We want... information
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Re: An Escalating Scale of Insults
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-- Will Scarlet, in Robin Hood