Re: i t works

[Rob Kendrick <lua-l@...>]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 11:04:18AM +0100, Mark Carter wrote:
> Brian Hook wrote:
> 
> >>Let me put it like this: do you use /, \, :, . or <other> to
> >>seperate path elements?
> >
> 
> >Anyway, I think the point has been made =)
> 
> Good point. I never thought about the idiosyncracies. I've actually now 
> read the recent thread concerning this matter.
> 
> But I would like to readdress the issue; please don't construe it as 
> trolling. I'm trying to be constructive.
> 
> I'm taking my views from the angle that Lua, to be taken seriously, must 
> have directory listing. 

Lua, when compared to the likes of Perl, Python, Ruby, or even C has a
very different aim.  It's designed to be highly portable, and extremely
embeddable.  It wasn't really a design constraint, IIRC, for it to be
nice to write whole applications in it.  It's designed for embedding
into other programs, and extending it to be domain-specific for your own
needs.  

Also, considering all the different OSes that people want to run Lua on,
maintaining an interface to the OS that ANSI C doesn't define would be
absolute headache; something I imagine the Lua guys don't really want,
as it would steer the language away from their aims and the target
audience.

It might be nice for Lua to have a CPAN-alike, with an extremely strict
layout, which people can put things like this in.  (Certainly, having
things like directory listings and popen in a lightweight library rather
than in the core, or bundled together with the whole POSIX stuff sounds
like a nice idea to me - for they're both available on Windows with
little effort, where the rest of the POSIX stuff isn't - any such thing
like CPAN would have to be finely grained.)

At some point, I'll have a play with LuaCheia.

B.
-- 
Rob Kendrick, Pepperfish Ltd.         +44 (0)845 226 4146  www.pepperfish.net
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