I know turtles are a bit OP for some tasks, and just yesterday I was against them being enabled. However, in the time since, I've changed my mind. Turtles can be used for many handy tasks. I recently hatched the idea of having multiple lesser-used machines stored in its inventory, and a program to have it swap between them in a block space with power running to it. (Use the wrench turtle for this, not the mining turtle unless you want to lose your machines.) Others have been suggesting it in the server, and I know everyone has their wacky ideas for their use! If there's an issue with their slight OP-ness, I'm sure we could figure something out. It's not like we don't have any more-OP things enabled. Another idea I had was a turtle to automatically place autocrafted solars onto my solar field.
While I do agree that turtles are very OP, and a lot of havoc can be wrought with them. I Do like the idea of having them enabled, or at least some of them (like keeping the mining turtle banned). I think the OPness could be remedied with either a very high fuel usage and very expensive crafting/buying price. I personally would love to have an XP and melee turtle, and the it would influence me to actually get into lua and do stuff instead of just running aorund bored.
I agree with the use of turtles within alice however, no turtles with a block breaking ability should be enabled. Not even in the mining world.
Assumption1: Blocks broken by turtles can't be traced back to the player that used the turtle. Assumption2: Blocks broken by labeled turtles are logged. Crazy idea: Put user and admin accounts on labeled turtles. Lock down the turtle so that the user cannot change the label. Now everything that the turtle does can be logged and tracked. Treat the turtle like a company laptop. The user won't want to loan out the turtle because he is responsible for any action. If the turtle is lost or destroyed then the user pays for a new one. I'm not sure how theft could be handled. Can turtles call home on start up and transmit coords?
I have very little experience with turtles/CC. That's why I put those as assumptions. Also, I don't even know if separate user accounts are possible with CC.
Since CC is lua based, it pretty much means that nearly anything and everything is possible. And with sk as the owner, i would say it would definitely be a viable option.
FORTH is just different. It's stack based - nothing like Lua. Some say its harder, some say its easier. I can't say much because I haven't paid much attention to it.
in my experience, fourth is only good for "stacking" commands hurr hurr. But i haven't dabbled it in for nearly a year. So idk anymore.
Modern programming languages are trending towards abstraction, and object orientation, which means that you have functions under other things that you can use to organize. This is what the "." does in lua. When you do term.redirect(...), the term is the object and redirect(...) the member. In FORTH, there are no such things as objects. Everything you do is put on different "stacks" that carry information. This is why it is very hard to do abstraction in FORTH, and why everything you have to do yourself. I honestly don't understand why Eloraam went for retro-outdated stuff when programming a mod that makes things more "modern."
I think Eloraam did it because her version of computers is emulated (which is AFAIK less heavy for servers). ComputerCraft uses the server's CPU directly, which is why it was easier for the creator of ComputerCraft to use Lua. But, as I said, the RedPower computers' OS is emulated, which makes it harder to use a higher level language. Of course, I might just be talking rubbish right now, because I'm not completely sure how it works.
