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rivescript.next

This GitHub repo serves as a collaboration space for designing a successor to the RiveScript scripting language.

Most discussion will first be done through GitHub Issues, and later through pull requests as design docs are written.

Order of Operations

The rough timeline for planning should follow these steps:

  • Define all of the problems, limitations and headaches encountered with RiveScript as it exists today.
  • Define all the core features that the new language should support.
  • Define the syntax for how the new language should look.
  • Write design docs in Markdown, reStructured Text or a similar text-based documentation system; submit docs via Pull Requests so they can be reviewed and commented on.
  • Finalize the design docs and spec, e.g. write a complete Working Draft of the language from an implementation-agnostic point of view.
  • Begin developing the reference implementation.

Core Design Goals

The following are some very high level characteristics of the new chatbot scripting language, many of which are not up for discussion and represent the bare minimum requirements of the scripting language:

  • I will only implement this in one programming language. Making five different implementations of RiveScript was a double-edged sword: more users could use it more easily, but it made it harder to improve the language when I wanted all five versions to maintain feature parity.

    The choice of programming language is limited to one that can expose a C compatible API to offer linkability with other programming languages. For example: Go, Rust, C or C++ are options here. I know JavaScript and Python are very popular languages, but programs written for them are not portable to other languages. They could make use of the new module via C bindings or an RPC API.

  • It will be feature backward-compatible with RiveScript. The syntax won't look the same, but the new language MUST support all the existing features of RiveScript, and a converter tool MUST be able to losslessly translate RiveScript code into the new syntax.

  • The syntax should be as clear to read as possible, with minimal line noise. It should look more like Python than Perl.

How to Contribute

Unless it turns out to be inefficient, discussions will be done using GitHub's features: the Issues will be used for high level discussions, and later on, Pull Requests will be used to review and comment on the design docs and language specifications.

If you're a RiveScript user or have thoughts and opinions about how a better bot scripting language could work, feel free to comment on the issues and pull requests.

I'm using tags on the issues to keep them organized. Feel free to start a new issue if your comment doesn't fit on any of the existing ones.