RE: Why Lua

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>From lua-l@tecgraf.puc-rio.br  Wed Jun 21 10:15:05 2000
>From: "Vincent Penquerc'h" <vincent@calcaphon.com>
>
>> We had a previous, unborn language called Sol (sun).
>Just out of curiosity, did this langage have some similarity
>with Lua, or was it going a different way ?

As far as I can remember (Roberto can correct me here), Sol was to be a
pure declarative language, very much like BibTeX -- that's why we has @
starting table constructors in the very old days of Lua 1.1. See the
SEMISH'94 paper at http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/semish94.html .

I think Sol never actually existed beyond the design phase: at that time,
I was involved with changing another declarative language (DEL) to a more
powerful language and I got together with Roberto and Waldemar and decided
that TeCGraf really needed a single, good, general-purpose extension language,
and that's how Lua was born.

Those who can read Portuguese may want to read the paper below, which describes
the use of DEL:

 "Geração de Interfaces para Captura de Dados sobre Desenhos",
 Proceedings of V SIBGRAPI, 81-87, November 1992
 http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lula/public/sib92.ps.gz

DEL is described in more detail in an internal document available at
	ftp://ftp.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/pub/lhf/doc/tecgraf/del.ps.gz
(also in Portuguese.)

That was quite a trip down Memory Lane... :-)
--lhf