Re: format change for precompiled files

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > However, can you take this opportunity to make a small but (IMO)
 > significant improvement?  script format allows you to have #!<lua path>
 > as the first line, so you can just run lua binaries directly. How about
 > putting into the beginning of the binary format "#!lua\n" so that it can
 > be run directly as a program on most UNIX systems (given that lua is in
 > the path, I think that works). 

Here's an alternative suggestion --- support binary files something
like the way Icon does:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  case $# in
     0) exec "${ICONX-/usr/local/icon-9.3/bin/iconx}" "$0";;
     *) exec "${ICONX-/usr/local/icon-9.3/bin/iconx}" "$0" "$@";;
  esac
  
  echo "Could not execute ${ICONX-/usr/local/icon-9.3/bin/iconx}" 1>&2
  exit 1
  
  [executable Icon binary follows]
      
  ^L

and the binary follows <form feed><newline>.
The path names are chosen at installation time.
It would be easy to write a main() that would scan forward, undump,
and run.

Norman