Re: Lua's 20th

[Patrick Rapin <toupie300@...>]

>> Wouldn't that be LUA? :] -miles
>
>
> ?? LUxate Accident?


A small historical reminder would certainly fit in the context of the
20th birthday.
Every Lua programmer knows (or should know ! ) that the language is
spelled Lua and not LUA since it is the Moon and not an acronym.

Well, not quite...
LUA used to be an acronym for TeCGraf also, not only for Microsoft [1]
or IBM [2] ! And it did not mean at that time "Lua Uppercase
Accident", like the current retronym.

The name of the language comes from a briefly used programming
language named Simple Object Language (SOL), developed for PETROBRAS.
In parallel, another language named Data-Entry Language (DEL) has been
written for the same company.
When the two developing groups decided to fusion the two languages
into a single more powerful one, it was clear that the successor of
SOL (meaning Sun in Portuguese) should be LUA (Moon) ! And to complete
the joke, that acronym was supposed to mean "Linguagem para Usuarios
de Aplicação" (Language for Application Users).

You can have a proof of this if you look inside the source code of the
first Lua versions [3]. From version 1.0 up to 2.5, the header lua.h
contains the following copyright notice:

** LUA - Linguagem para Usuarios de Aplicacao
** Grupo de Tecnologia em Computacao Grafica
** TeCGraf - PUC-Rio

Starting at Lua 3.0 and up to 5.1, the acronym is gone and replaced by
the motto "Lua - An Extensible Extension Language". And Lua 5.2 now
states "Lua - A Scripting Language".

The reason for which Lua authors decided to change the spelling to
"Lua" seems to be that not-Portuguese speakers have problems
understanding the acronym and the underlying joke; an astronomical
object name is easier to explain. Please respect their naming decision
! But this not does mean we should all forget the history.


[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc700846.aspx
[2] http://ibm.co/Oy2ly7
[3] http://www.lua.org/ftp/