On Sep 20, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Paul Hudson wrote: >I REALLY like many things about Lua, mostly its small size and modest goals. >I really respect its designers for keeping its scope small. > I even respect them for holding fast to their syntax. >But it's just a showstopper for a company like Apple and I'm sure we're not the only ones. I’m not sure how many other companies would have a problem. None I’ve worked for would, despite some of them making extensive use of _javascript_ for client and server side applications. It seems odd to say “we can’t use that language because a few of the syntax elements are different”, while the fact that the semantics and much else are different is (seemingly) not a an issue.
I don't think the semantics are all that different. I wrote an object system, which added the semantics of the _javascript_ Object and Array to Lua. It's certainly not identical. The real question is whether something that you could consider a rational subset of _javascript_ (without exceptions, regular expressions, etc.) would be tolerable for end users. Maybe it still would not be useable. But we'll never know because we can't get past the syntax!
In other words, a language that is syntactically very close to _javascript_ but where that similar syntax does different things seems more dangerous, more mistake-prone and less desirable. It seems to me the only rational result of mandating this is to have a language with the syntax of _javascript_ and the semantics of _javascript_. But that would be _javascript_ J
You may well be right.
I’d seriously have doubts about a company that determined language acceptability on syntactical issues…. And as others have pointed out, it would mean no Perl, no Python. no Ruby,… which is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It depends on the use. If someone wants to write a game using Lua, or a file filter using Python, that's great. But when you're presenting something for end users, it has to be familiar. And management in my realm doesn't want to expose those end users to something new. For better or worse I have to agree with this philosophy. So I have to shelf my interest in Lua for the time being, I suppose.
----- ~Chris And now, an important message from Microsoft:
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