Re: why lua?

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi,

On 12/18/2010 01:50 AM, Philipp A. wrote:
>
> like… which one? i only know of the tabs vs. spaces

The significant whitespace is why python would not have been
an option for the core extension language in luatex even if
it was twice as small and twice as fast as lua. Forced indentation
simply does not work out well if data and program are intermixed
in the same source file.

Which is not saying that I don't like python, but (also taking account
the other differences to lua) it is simply the wrong tool for the job.

> my dream for luatex/context would be a built-in lua interpreter (because
> lua is so fucking small) and optional modules for other, heavier,
> scripting languages (perl, ruby), which you don’t have to install.

An extended version of luatex-lunatic (or some similar project) would
potentially allow that. A lot of the lua functions that 'talk' to the
internals are nothing more than wrappers for argument and return value
grabbing, and it would be pretty easy to (re)code those bindings for
any other scripting language.

The remaining functions that are not trivially implemented are the
ones that we need to work on before 1.0, because these are the exactly
the areas where the TeX source is too messy to be easily interfaced,
in any scripting language.


Best wishes,
Taco
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