co-routines [was Re: Unicode]

[oti@...]

--- In lua-l@y..., Edgar Toernig <froese@g...> wrote:
> Discussions are very difficult if you get no response...  I guess 
that
> most subscribers are programmers but there have been not very much
> discussions about new ideas and their implementation.  Pretty 
strange.

I have been reading lua-l on egroups for about a year now, but  I 
decided to subscribe just to reply to this message.

The main reason I use lua is as a small, fast, embedded, C-callable 
scripting language. There are other languages I have evaluated for 
this purpose: Scheme (libscheme, UMBscheme and Tinyscheme), s-lang, 
Small (a C-alike), various small Forth implementations (FICL, 4th), 
and various small Basics (YABL, SmallBasic, Bywater Basic).

Small, Forth and Basic I discarded because they lacked enough 
variable types (notably floating point), and have limiting semantics. 
Scheme is my personal favourite, but implementations suffer from a 
lack of speed, plus the syntax is a problem from a maintenance and 
widespread useability viewpoint.  S-lang and Lua have easily 
learnable, conventional syntaxes. Lua wins out over s-lang because it 
is (a) very small and (b) has better semantics.

What I am *not* looking for is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink 
language. That niche is already filled with the likes of Tcl, Perl, 
Python, Ruby, Pike etc, and turning Lua into such a language would be 
a tremendous duplication of effort.

I am also not looking for a language with cute, advanced features. 
Small extension languages rarely require them in practice: how often 
are continuations needed in scripts? R5RS Scheme is a fine language 
to experiment in; this is a very small niche indeed.

I am currently very satisfied with Lua 4.0; coroutines would be a 
welcome addition, and a little more support for modules and 
namespaces would be nice, but a lot of the extra syntactic sugar 
being proposed is IMHO simply not neccessary.

Cheers,
Elliott Oti