Re: why lua?

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 18-12-2010 1:50, Philipp A. wrote:

> but don’t get me wrong, i love context and luatext, i just like other
> languages better than lua (you weren’t content with latex and created
> context, so this shouldn’t be alien to you)

Sure, it's just that the core of context will be tex/lua only as it 
needs to be portable and mixing languages will not help at that level.

Probably the best way to use other languages in applications of context 
/ luatex is to do something lunatic that luigi did, the overhead of 
wrapping is probably neglectable. We can look into that around luatex 
version 1.0.

For me personally the only reason to look into pyton (or ruby or perl or 
php or ...) would be that it's needed in a project but so far i never 
had such projects i.e. could choose my own languages (so it was ruby at 
some point and lua now). Who knows what the future brings.

Hans

ps. I once read about Icon as language and somehow that one also had 
some appeal. I never had a running environment. Smalltalk is also nice, 
esp the (original) books (esp the historic one), and Lisp (in relation 
to tex) also has some appeal. Live is too short to learn all those 
languages and stay fluent in them, i.e. one simply forgets a lot when 
usage zeros.

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