Re: why lua?

[Philipp Gesang <pgesang@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>]

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On 2010-12-18 <01:50:29>, Philipp A. wrote:

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> well, i just like it. and since i don’t know lua (well, that’s not exactly
> true, but i can’t write a normal sized script without looking things up),
> and tend to do things like i would do them in other languages i know. e.g.:
> how do you loop elegantly over table values? “for k,v in pairs(t) do print(v)
> end” creates a throwaway variable k, which doesn’t seem right. some things

Depending on whether you want to access the non-hashed content as
well you might want to use the “next” iterator instead as it’s
slightly faster (according to my tests, that is). You won’t get
around the local variable, though; I have no clue and no time to
check if it’s even technically feasible to iterate a hash table
without accessing the hashes.

> are totally counter-intuitive for me like tables beginning with index 1, and
> so on.

Feels natural after some time, I guarantee. And you’ll never look
the same way at a fencepost again …

What you’ll miss most is all the nice shortcuts and syntactic
sugar like “setdefault(k,[]).append(v)” (two lines in Lua) and
the lazy handling of arrays, strings &c. as sequences that can be
iterated over like it was all the same, and probably the error
handling. Nothing you can’t live without.

> > Anyhow, I don't like languages that need religious arguments to become
> > popular.

> or are you talking about lua having been invented at a catholic university
> and thus being a product of a sect somehow?

Never looked at it that way. There should be a “fun facts”
section on the wiki to list all the confusing mysteries
surrounding context.

Regards,
Philipp


PS:

> kross is the project for bringing consistent scripting to KDE, and it is
> just awesome, since it allows you to write stuff in the scripting language
> of your choice.

Apart from being OT, you can always switch to a window manager
that uses your favorite scripting language instead -- mine has
Lua inside which is a lot cleaner than doing configuration in
e.g. bash or something.



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