Originally Posted by
Olafski
If the list is infinite, won't that still mean that developers will have to choose sensible ID ranges? It'll be less likely to have collisions, but I reckon it could (and will) still happen.
Unless all mods add the option to auto assign and/or only use one ID (like RedPower used to do), this will only make it less of a problem.
I think the reason there is no mod api is because Mojang wants to be able to change their code however they want. They don't want to have to think about the issues that the Forge team is currently handling, namely keeping their API mostly stable. Forge abstracts this so the mods don't have to update everything for every release. I'm thinking the main reason here is the messy code that Minecraft was started with, which was never fully refactored.