How tied to Python is Blender? How difficult would it be to make it scripting-language-neutral so that people could "plug in" other scripting languages (like Perl or tcl for example)?

with a good blender api, anything can be done

it's not easy to change the scripting language.
search in the source files for "PyObject".
then you see what i mean.

_florian_

I would think you would want to avoid adding this complexity.

A language like python is pretty easy to learn for any experienced programmer. But implementing several scripting languages, and supporting all of them properly with documentation, and keeping their api's compatible? that sounds like alot of work, perhaps work better spend in other areas of blender?

The Perl interpreter is open-source isn't it?

If so then you would just have to include its source code in the blender source code and write some extra code to envoke it at the right time.

Personally i think python is a much nicer language than Perl though.

Not that I'm saying it should be done but I would be for perl as an option to
python.

If anyone is going to seriously tackle this take a look at swig.
http://www.swig.org/

Its basically a tool to help you write wrappers/interfaces for various languages and should simplify the multiple languages problem quite a bit.

What's wrong with Python?

sasKuach wrote:

What's wrong with Python?

There isn't anything wrong with python per se; I think some people just aren't comfortable/happy with the idea of having only a _single_ extensible language.

I see your point. The easiest thing I can think of to solve that is to use binary plugins (like texture plugins, for ex) that are compiled from any language the user desires.