Re: Inline Functions

[Björn De Meyer <bjorn.demeyer@...>]

Peter Hill wrote:
> 
> 
> Viewing the way someone else has done something before trying it yourself
> can inhibit understanding. Of course I wouldn't do this for a project that
> was huge, but Lua is quite petite.

There, I don't quite agree. I think you can learn a lot
from other people's code, especially when it's 
well-written code. Ah well it's a matter of taste, I guess.

> Since I've always had an interest in various programming languages, and
> desire to write my own to include some features I feel are currently missing
> from those on offer, it is extra enlightening.

Of course, you could also write your own language 
that is 100% to your own liking. 

> To be "quick" requires not just language power but also an excellent
> debugging environment. I haven't yet found a Lua IDE that comes close to VB.
> :-(

I've always thought that debuggers are overrated. Yeah, when
programming C, they can be useful to see where you make 
a memory handling error. But for interpreted languages with
garbage collection, crashes because of memory handling 
errors can  normally not occur. Most of the errors will be 
logical errors, and those can be solved only by thinking.


> No, but it could be interesting. I'll try whipping one up.
Good! :)

> I always feel a good language should be able to be neatly written in itself.
> It's not as useful as writting C in C, though, since Lua doesn't compile to
> machine code.

If we ghave Lua in Lua, we can also retarget it.

> Ok, I've now written a lex-in-lua module (though not yet exhaustively
> debugged it). Would you care to look at it and offer some commentary?

Yes, certainly. If it's less than 10 to 20 Kb, I think it won't 
harm for you to post it here for all to see. The more eyballs, 
the merrier. If it's larger, then just mail it to 
my home address, or maybe put it on the wiki.

> IDL? Alas, I know nothing of writting DLLs in C. And I only have VB6 so
> don't have access .NET stuff.

Well, writing DLLs in C is simple on unix/linux, and complex 
on Windows... 

> I meant 'minor' in that they would not produce a significant change of
> language operation, so I doubted people would be bothered trying them.

Hmmm... some of tha changes would alter the flavor of the language, 
though, and I think people would like to try those.

> Ok. Well, that may take a while. I've printed the Lua5 source but it is not
> strongly commented and may take a while to understand well enough to feel
> safe modifying.

As I said before, I'm familiarw with llex.c, and I find it not
that hard to understand. The parser biggles me a bit more, though.
Perhaps you could focus on that lparse.c? 

-- 
"No one knows true heroes, for they speak not of their greatness." -- 
Daniel Remar.
Björn De Meyer 
bjorn.demeyer@pandora.be