Re: What makes Lua special?

[Oliver Kroth <oliver.kroth@...>]

> Do you have anything else that comes to your mind? I would also 
> greatly appreciate input regarding other languages that implement 
> these things above and how it's done there. I'm quite fluent in Java, 
> C#, C, Javascript and knowledgeable in C++ and PHP. While reflection 
> works in these languages (somehow), it's often requires very arcane 
> knowledge to do similar things as mentioned 1-3.
What I like very much at Lua, and use a lot:

- you can use anything as index in a table, including other tables, 
functions, coroutines, and userdata, like sockets.
This saves a lot of CPU time when managing these resources

- multiple vale assignment, and especiall the fact that functions may 
return multiple values like
  a,b = b,a
or
  angle, radius = toPolar( x,y )

- closures are great for, e.g. scheduling actions, as parameter for 
pattern substitution, iterators, etc.
once I got the concept, I don't want to miss them again.

- string.gsub() is one of the best find and replace implementations I 
came across  in my not too short programming history.
Not even that one can use a function (more precisely a closure) as 
parameter for the substitution, a table is fun enough.
It is not often that a UTF-8 to something else conversion is a one-liner:
  win1252 = utf8:gsub(  '[\xc0-\xef][\x80-\xbf]+', utf8ToWin1252 )
(utf8ToWin1252 is a table with the UTF8 encoding as keys and the 
win-1252 encoding as values)

--
Oliver