Re: Lua Strengths/Weaknesses and usage info

[Christian Vogler <cvogler@...>]

On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 03:24:36PM +0100, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> Or alternatively, which force you to write your own libraries! I've never
> found Lua verbose (though admittedly I've not programmed much in other high
> level languages with good libraries such as Java, Perl or Python);

I've programmed a lot in Perl and also a bit in Python. I find that my
lua programs are longer by about a factor of 1.2-1.5. Granted, compared to
C, or even Java, this is not verbose, but as far as "scripting"
languages (scripting in quotes, because I think that this attribute
does a lot of languages gross injustice) go, lua tends to be on the
more verbose end. YMMV.

> have found that I've accumulated quite a few utility routines after just a
> little Lua scripting. However, a lot of these are very general purpose or
> widely useful, e.g. die(), warn(), wrappers for the file routines which call
> die on error, and general list operations such as mapping a function over a
> list, applying a function to each element of a list, or concatenating two
> lists.

So did we. As a matter of fact, map() was one of the first functions
we wrote, although its utility has diminished a little with the new
for syntax in lua 4.0. Perhaps at some point we should see if we can
accumulate the most useful functions from everyone into a
general-purpose library.

> What about using poslib? POSIX has support for dealing with directories.

This is probably what we will do sooner or later. The one thing I
don't like about it is that I think that this should be a
operating-system-neutral abstraction on those OSs that support
directories. POSIX is not as portable as it could be. 

- Christian