I was reading in an old post that the speed of TWX scripts against REXX scripts in ZOC are about the same. Did I understand that right? REXX looks a lot harder to script in though.

REXX was my first language, so I think it's pretty easy. Download the Revered's Zoc script pack and take a look at what he's done. His have not been updated for quite some time, so a lot of them no longer run.

Either way, REXX or TWX, scripts run very fast in ZOC. I'll sometimes have Swath, TWX and Zoc all open to the same game file and toggle between Swath for the maps & Fed/SS chat and Zoc for speed scripting.

I'm probably the wrong guy to comment on this, but I do not believe that assertion to be true. Rev and I have worked together a number of times on various projects, and at times we've written parallel code - he in REXX and I in TWX. My recollection, which is terrible admittedly, is that optimized TWX code was significantly faster than optimized REXX code. I'll invite Rev to comment though, and I encourage you to trust his memory over mine.

Aside from speed, the TWX language is made up of about 100 commands, of which most scripts probably use 20 or fewer commands. Constructs like loops and arrays are likely similar, and therefore required learning regardless of scripting language. There is no easier way to script for TW. If you are looking for the simple way, the easy way, the short-cut way... TWX IS the easy way.

Still hoping for that list of those 20 twx scripting commands....
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Dig up that old thread or start a new one, and I'll dig up my list for ya. I wrote a script that parsed all of my scripts and counted the frequency of the commands used. I thought I'd shared that previously. Maybe we can follow it up with some scripting sessions based around the most commonly used commands... as in recorded videos for posterity.

Thanks for that reply EP, I am using TWX now because of it's speed and 'new scripter friendliness' I guess you would call it of TWX. I was just interested in the speed comparison of the 2 for a later time, like if I ever manage to take some programming classes or somehow pick up more programming knowledge.

I had read somewhere that REXX has more 'programmer' type functions in it and some of the posts talk about how that would be handy for making scripts shorter and less 'complicated' for a programmer. So, was just curious if REXX was as fast as TWX for scripting. Thanks for the heads up that it probably isn't

I wouldn't worry about helper speed too much. Even a decent ping time of 50ms is an eternity to your CPU.

Imagine you're playing a board game, but you're a block away from the board and you have assistants running back and forth to make your moves and find out what's going on. Making faster decisions might gain you a little, but having a more sophisticated system will gain you a lot.