userdata considerations

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile@...>]

>>>>> "mnicolet" == mnicolet  <mnicolet@satlink.com> writes:

    mnicolet> I migrated to lua 5.0a because userdata manageability.
    mnicolet> Also, I devised a lot of userdata support routines.
    mnicolet> They are included in luapi ... I will post the lua 5.0
    mnicolet> version of it next days.  The best (unique ?) way I
    mnicolet> found to deal with userdata is to have a "constructor"
    mnicolet> for every of them; u = newudtype( construction arguments
    mnicolet> here ) Of course, every userdata "type" must have its
    mnicolet> own constructor, and of course, the constructor
    mnicolet> semantics is privative for the "type" ...  But I"am
    mnicolet> thinking about lua"s native support for that stuff.  My
    mnicolet> first and main "userdata" is a lua bind to some class I
    mnicolet> use extensively in my applications to "wrap" the native
    mnicolet> C/C++ objects. [...] 

I skipped an interesting part of Mnicolet's message. But I think it
raise the following issue: is lua a C or C++ embeddable scripting
language, i.e. does the Lua API target C or C++?

I definitely think Lua (even the 5. and future 6. versions) should
target C, not C++.

If you designed a language easy to embed into C++ applications (which
lua is not, it targets C not C++) you'll get a different API and a
different language.

I undestand C++ coders are using Lua, but Lua should target C coders,
not C++ one!

-- 

Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
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