Re: why lua?

["Philipp A." <flying-sheep@web.de>]

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hans, some of the things you said are a bit unclear to me:

2010/12/18 Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>

>  Ah .. the extending vs the embedding debate ... well, an argument could
> have been that we don't want to extend python -)
>

see last paragraphs.

I've only used Pascal, Modula2, Perl (after all that compiling and linking I
> loved the scripting aspect but the language ... well ...), Ruby (brought me
> back happy Modula memories but it got so huge and had incompatible updates
> but is still my second choice), but I feel quite happy with Lua now.
>

give python a try. i love it because it has the writability of perl without
(de)referencing and funny symbols, and a class system like java/c++/… (no
prototyping and stuff)

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

so i guess it’s natural that i would like to use a scripting language i know
and like, like python.

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


like… which one? i only know of the tabs vs. spaces and vim vs. emacs
religious wars. i can’t remember of any languages being subdued to that.

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

Hans
>

what i want to show you is kross<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kross_%28KDE%29>
.
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.

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. i don’t care if
python is embedded or extended, i just want to write \directpython{for num
in [9,2,4,8]: ctx.print(num**3)} (or sth. like that)

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)

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