yet another lua suitability question

[p j <godspiral2000@...>]

I learned Lua with Plua on the palm.  It is an
outstanding project that provides a gui layout
manager, and is a lot of fun to develop  with.

I love Lua's design and syntax.  It has the right
orientation towards oop (references are the only
useful concept that ever came out of oop), and exposes
the full power of functional programmming without
forcing you to shoehorn every paradigm into immutable
data, or prevent use of iterative/imperative processes
if conceptually convenient.

The project I have in mind is a source code
manipulator, and higher level language processing to
enable code transformations at the editor level (code
reuse and program stitching/glue).  The design has a
simple core of data mapping and grammar processing.  I
will also eventually need XPath processing and create
new UI widgets.

I've found WxLua and it seems to work well enough.  My
concerns about using Lua have nothing to do with the
language itself, but rather the fact that I dont know
C or its build process.  That means I wont be able to
integrate features (like Xpath) until I do learn C,
and it also means releasing initial versions for
WxLua, which I have no idea if anyone actually uses :)

An alternative is to use python.  I wouldn't have to
learn C because the extensions I need will be
incorporated soon enough, and my initial releases
wouldn't need wxlua to be useful... so would reach a
wider audience even if the concept itself is best
implemented in Lua.

Am I right in assuming that any general purpose
programming done in Lua needs working knowledge of
building Lua in C?  And so if you can't make that
commitment, you should choose another language?


	

	
		
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