Wednesday, January 5, 2000

I’m home from work today. I had a bit of a sore throat this morning, so I decided to stay home and do a bit of research for work.

On Sunday, I implemented a scripting engine for Baxter, a BeOS IRC client. I’m very pleased; it can do quite a lot more than I had initially feared. This is another one of those cases where lots of design beforehand resulted in a surprisingly smooth programming effort.

For the non-geeks out there, perhaps a few definitions are in order. A scripting engine is a piece of software that takes programming code (e.g., “/msg $chan Hi, my name is $nick and 1 + 2 is $calc(1 + 2 )”) and translates it into the intended result (e.g., “/msg #newbies Hi, my name is Rick and 1 + 2 is 3”). This will be part of an IRC client, or a program that connects to internet chat servers (“IRC” = Internet Relay Chat), and lets users chat on that server.

So, between watching cartoons, I implemented a few more features of the language. I hope to have user-defined variables set up soon, too.