Re: Lua on DOS with 8086

["John Belmonte" <jvb@...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo" <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <lua-l@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: Lua on DOS with 8086


> because Lua is small (and can be made smaller, see LTN1), and the
> competition (perl, python) is bloated. :-)

Having recently ported Lua to an embedded system (no change to Lua... just a
matter of patching up the ANSI holes in the system's library), now I'm
trying to tackle Python.  Python is huge in code and binary size, trying to
figure out the build system is a nightmare, and from what I can tell even
the "base" system isn't ANSI.  For example, to generate a .pyc file when the
.py file is newer it has to resort to POSIX/unix calls to check the file
dates.

Ok back to Lua... I'd like to call attention to Edgar Toernig's excellent
post "Shared activation records are cheaper!".  I hope the Lua team will
give the idea some consideration.  It would be great to have lexical scoping
in Lua.  I think with that feature the Lua community could work on standard
systems for namespaces, modules, and classes that would fit on top of
TecGraf's Lua base.  The gap between this enhanced Lua and Python would
narrow, and future programmers might be spared porting Python.

-John