RE: Lua Strengths/Weaknesses and usage info

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

Christian Vogler wrote:
> 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.

Verbose is in the eye of the beholder... In a previous thread, we talked
about APL, which is very terse, but a bit hard to understand without being a
disciple... Forth is a bit like that too. Perl is terse, but quite cryptic. Etc.
I thought that modern programming stress out the clarity of code over the
conciseness. Ie. on maintenability over the comfort of the programmer (the one
who write the code, not the one who have to maintain it!).
 
> > 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.

Yes! I see often here remarks on useful things made by mailing list members,
but when I search for Lua source code examples on the Web, I don't find
much... This is quite frustating, even if I understand that some code can't be
released because of NDA, close source development, etc.

I took a look at the Euphoria site mentionned previously. It is a close
source, semi-free language, available only on two platforms. Yet, it has
attracted a number of fans, providing a lot of code snippets or full blown programs.
That, too, is a measure of the popularity of a language.

Now, the comparison isn't fair, since Lua main goal is to be embedded in
applications, while Euphoria is a standalone language. So the population of Lua
users is quite smaller (mostly programmers whose aim is to do a program with
support of Lua) than the Euphoria one (programmers whose aim is to do
programs in Euphoria).

Lua can be used standalone, but currently (4.0), there isn't much support
for external libraries (callable from programs executed by the standard Lua
interpreter), no Windows support (yet), etc.

I mention Windows because, you think what please you about it, but it is
still the most used system in the world, so it has a good user base.

> > 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
> 

PS. I can't reach Lua site today?

Regards.

-- 
--._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.--
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/
--´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`·._.·´¯`--

Sent through GMX FreeMail - http://www.gmx.net