Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

David Given wrote:

> In addition, it *is* a fantastic teaching language --- not for teaching
> programming, but for teaching language and compiler design. I'd
> encourage anyone with an interest in the subject to go and design a
> Forth threaded interpreter for your favourite architecture. It is a
> thing of beauty, and utterly unlike any other modern language today. I
> wasn't kidding when I said that learning Forth taught me how to write C;
> you will suddenly realise that that everything you've ever learnt is
> merely one way of doing things, and there are many others, all equally
> valid...

Obviously, I had not read this Forth tangent before my other response :-)

The thing that broguth me to Lua was looking for a small interpreted
language that could fit into 256K of FLASH, run in 64K of RAM, and was
not FORTH ;-)

I wrote pbForth for the old LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX - it was about 12K
and included an included an inline H8/300 assembler! The lowest level
words were all written in assembler, and the higher level stuff was
done with a Tcl based macro language. I'd use ua for that today, of course.

Ralph