[ANN] Penlight Libraries, First release

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

Hi guys,

A number of substantial changes since the last beta.

The map and reduce functions now take the function first, as Nature intended.

The Python-like overloading of '*' for strings has been dropped, since it
is silly. Also, strings are no longer callable; use 's:at(1)' instead of
's(1)' - this tended to cause Obscure Error messages.

Wherever a function argument is expected, you can use the operator strings
like '+','==',etc as well as pl.operator.add, pl.operator.eq, etc.
(see end of pl/operator.lua for the full list.) So you can say:

  reduce('+',tbl)

tablex now has compare() and compare_no_order(). An explicit set()
function has been added which constructs a table with the specified
keys, all set to a value of true.

List has reduce() and partition() (This is a cool function which
separates out elements of a list depending on a classifier function.)

There is a new array module which generalizes tablex operations like
map and reduce for two-dimensional arrays. An iterator is provided
that behaves like a generalized ipairs:

for i,j,v in array.iter(A,true) do print(i,j,v) end

(It complements but does not aim to provide matrix operations)

The famous iterator over permutations from PiL 9.3 has been included;
I needed it for array.product, which does a cartesian product of two lists.

David's list comprehension library has been included.

Also, utils now contains his memoize function, plus a useful function
args which captures the case where varargs contains nils.

There was a bug with dir.copyfile where the flag was the wrong way round.

config.lines() had a problem with continued lines.

Some operators were missing in pl.operator; have renamed them to be
consistent with the Lua metamethod names.

There is no doubt a fair amount of redundant and tautologous functionality,
but the winners will improve and the losers will be weeded out.
No cows are sacred at this stage; please try to break.

Any suggestions are welcome.

http://penlight.luaforge.net/penlight.html

http://luaforge.net/frs/download.php/4051/pl.0.6.3.zip

steve d.