LSL3

Purpose

The purpose of the LSL3 project is to design a new programing language that would replace LSL2 in Second Life.

Design Ideals

• It should be designed to enable expression and not hinder expression with complex or over burdensome syntax requirements.
• C style syntax and order of operations
• Type safety
• Strongly Typed

Goal

• Address the shortcomings of LSL2 and add new functionality while limiting the increase of language complexity.
• Design LSL3 with Hierarchical Linking in mind MISC-2237

Proposed Changes for LSL2

Here are some proposed changes to LSL2. Please add new changes, if they cannot be summed up in a single sentence please create a subpage to this article and put a link in the appropriate section.

Major changes

• Object model
• Get rid of get and set functions, use getters and setters instead where possible (syntax sugar).
• Persistent storage/memory

Syntax

• Fix quaternion ordering
• Provide quaternion-scalar multiplication
• Provide quaternion exponentiation q^a where a is a float. (Useful for interpolating rotations to achieve smoothness)
• Object model for base types
• Array indexer
• continue and break keywords.
• switch statement.

Types

• User defined class & structures
  • Duck Typing (LinFu?)
  • Anonymous classes?
• bool type
• pointers
• Remove restriction on lists containing lists
• const

Functions

• Organized into static classes?
• Or keep the namespace flat to keep the syntax simple.

States & Events

• State variables.
• User defined events that can be triggered by external scripts.
• Functions that are only available to specific states.

Libraries

• Script libraries that can be sold and passed around.
• Natural syntax which can be used instead of link_message

Flaws with LSL2

Here is a list of flaws with LSL2 that should be fixed.

Combining Quaternions

• See SVC-1047 for a full description of this.

Evaluation order

• Given the code f(a) + g(a), currently g(a) gets executed before f(a).
  • Changing this so f(a) gets executed first should improve performance on Mono.

Comparisons of lists

• Only length is compared.
• The result of a list equality is the difference of the lengths.

'if else' syntax

• if([1]) evaluates to false.
• if !(STRING) gives syntax error, forcing if (STRING == "") Applies to all types in which ! cannot be put directly in front.

llInsertString

• Does not support negative indexes.

llDetected* Functions

• Do not support negative indexes.

Resources

• SVC-1657