which scripting language?

I'm new to Mushclient (I currently use zMud *gasp*). But zMud is a bit slow. I currently dont know Vb, Java, or Perl; in truth the only language I DO know much about is Python.

Its all a bit confusing, from what I can tell I'll need to choose one of those 3 to use, and make a start at learning it. Does anyone have suggestions? I randomly read through a few posts, and Perl does make a tiny bit more sense to me than the other two, but any advice people can give would be appreciated...

Oh, one other quick question - can I make (and test) aliases etc off-line? My mud was crashed tonight and I was mucking about trying to work out how Mushclient works, but every time I tried to enter anything into the command line it asked me if I wanted to connect to the mud.

Which language is better? It is hard to say. My assessment would be (having done quite a few examples in all three):

VBscript

Probably the simplest, based as it is on "Basic". Also the array handling is probably the most natural.

JScript

A lot like C, so if you like C you will probably find JScript the most natural.

Perlscript

More Unix-like. If you are familiar with Unix, or you want extensive string handling, probably the best, although it can look a little more obscure, with lots of "$" signs everywhere.

Examples

Take a look at the MUSHclient functions page, this gives examples in all three languages, for various script functions. You can compare the examples and see which you like the best.

This is at:


http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/functions.htm


Testing aliases offline

Right now you can't do that in MUSHclient. Either find another MUD that is up, or download the SMAUG server from this site and fire it up. Then connect to that and test your aliases and triggers there. I do that quite a bit when testing, so I don't annoy other players with aliases that go wrong.

You can now script in Python in MUSHclient.