Hello!

[Dave Bollinger <DBollinger@...>]

   I've just joined the list and wish to say "Hello!" to my fellow Lua
fanatics!  This really looks cool, and I'm excited about it!  :-)

   I went back and read the entire mail archive (whew!) and it's very
encouraging to see how the language and tools have developed and matured
over such a short timeframe.  I've been researching possible candidates for
an embedded scripting language for a short while now, and was becoming
disheartened, until I (almost accidentally) stumbled across Lua.  The
language syntax is clean, the code is small and portable, the interface is
well thought out ... what more could I ask for?

  Some of the "tricks" in the mail archive, like the
table-full-of-functions switch statement, are oh-so clever!  Could I stick
lambda/anonymous functions in there?  (I'll get the correct Lua terminology
sorted out eventually)  And the whole tables+tagmethods concept, I think I
"get" this, seems _very_ powerful.


   I'll respond to some of the questions posed in the archive, in case
they're still "active":

   I can do without a "for" loop, "while" works fine.  I can do without a
native "switch" keyword, if/else plus the table trick ought to handle
anything I'm likely to require.  I appreciate the work put into wrapping
the stdio "printf's" - that was a BIG problem in one of the other scripting
languages I investigated.  I'll need a debugger, but the odds are that I'll
build my own because of the environment I expect to be using Lua in, which
is...

   My intended application is with a children's "Edutainment" title, a
"learning game", Windows environment.  There will be a number of discrete
mini-games with different categories of problems (math/word,
matching/choosing/etc) each of which I intend to script with Lua, with
extensive links into the core of the game "engine".  I intend to have a
separate Lua code module for each mini-game which will define a predefined
set of "event handlers" - basically just functions that will be called (for
example) "OnGameSetup", "OnGameLoop", "OnProblemSetup", "OnProblemLoop",
"OnProblemFinish", "OnGameFinish", etc.  Hopefully there will be no trouble
simply redefining the function names with each load of a new module.  (?) 
Or I'll set the old func defs to nil before redefine, whatever.


   I'd like to send specific greets out to Bret Mogilefsky (and your whole
GF team), I really enjoyed the game!  :-)  Especially Tony Plana's
over-the-top voice acting!  <grin>

   I'd also like to forewarn Michael T. Richter that I might have some
Windows DLL build questions for him.  ;-)

   Cheers,

   Dave