MDuffy
06-13-2003, 08:55 PM
Greetings,
I wanted to pick the brains of other people who use MEL in their daily work. My question is, What are the areas where MEL is weak as a programming language?
Sometime later this year I'm going to start working on my own graphics tool for playing with some algorithms/approaches (terrain and plant generation, texturing, image manipulation, etc) and I plan for it to be similar to Maya's node based system. It also needs a scripting language, and I'm leaning towards a design that is very MEL-like (which itself is very C-like). I've looked at other scripting languages to embed, but none of them really achieved what I wanted. So I'm planning on writing my own.
So what areas do you think that MEL's syntax or structure are not well done? I know that MEL's implementation of regular expressions is pretty lousy, and I've heard that it isn't great for manipulating images either. It also seems to me that its handling of vectors and matrixes isn't as smooth as it could be. It would also be nice to be able to set attributes with a simple assignment expression, rather than having to call setAttr (i.e. pObject.tx = 7.2). What other areas do you think that MEL is lacking? I just want to make sure I avoid those design pitfalls as I work on my own code.
Thanks for any input,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net
I wanted to pick the brains of other people who use MEL in their daily work. My question is, What are the areas where MEL is weak as a programming language?
Sometime later this year I'm going to start working on my own graphics tool for playing with some algorithms/approaches (terrain and plant generation, texturing, image manipulation, etc) and I plan for it to be similar to Maya's node based system. It also needs a scripting language, and I'm leaning towards a design that is very MEL-like (which itself is very C-like). I've looked at other scripting languages to embed, but none of them really achieved what I wanted. So I'm planning on writing my own.
So what areas do you think that MEL's syntax or structure are not well done? I know that MEL's implementation of regular expressions is pretty lousy, and I've heard that it isn't great for manipulating images either. It also seems to me that its handling of vectors and matrixes isn't as smooth as it could be. It would also be nice to be able to set attributes with a simple assignment expression, rather than having to call setAttr (i.e. pObject.tx = 7.2). What other areas do you think that MEL is lacking? I just want to make sure I avoid those design pitfalls as I work on my own code.
Thanks for any input,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net