Perhaps Nick Trout's interesting page, LuaTokenParsing,
on the wiki should be subtitled "Steps on the path from
a dynamic to a static language".
Of course a static language can be much faster; the strategy
is to do as much as possible at compile time and as little
at runtime. What is not clear to me is how much of Lua's
character and usefulness would be lost if it were not dynamic.
It is an intriguing area to explore. The danger is that so
many people have been grounded in C that they may be blind to
fresh possibilities. The ingredients of static compilation,
first class functions and lexical scoping have been the basis
of lots of functional languages, of varying degrees of success,
many of them spoilt by doctrinal issues of type theory,
unappealing syntax, or other impracticalities. Nevertheless
it might it be useful to speculate on what a "static Lua"
would be like.
--
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/
