Re: Supports Lua Includefiles?

[Christian Vogler <cvogler@...>]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 02:51:12PM -0400, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> > what require will do. It searches the current directory first, and
> > then the environment variable LUA_SCRIPT_PATH. It would be nice if
> > this functionality were part of the standard behavior of lua.


> Lua's primary goal is to make a powerful language available to those who
> wish to embed one in their products.  With every platform-specific feature
> you add, you bloat the language for no gain.  (Yes, environment variables
> and paths are platform-specific.  Hell, so are directories for that
> matter.;-)

The problem, as I see it, is that without such a feature it is
downright *impossible* to take advantage of reusable libraries in
lua. If you have no portable method of loading useful add-on features,
then how are we ever going to extend the functionality of the base
libraries for those people who need it? The libraries that come with
lua are very spartan (no offense intended to the authors; I understand
that there are tradeoffs involved).

For our application we needed a much more powerful set of library
functions than what the standard lua installation provides. We had to
write this one ourselves, which was a fairly time-consuming
process. Wouldn't it be nice if we could make them available in some
kind of repository, similar to perl's CPAN archive, so that other
people who need their functionality need not write *their* own
versions from scratch again? But that won't help if lua does not
provide the necessary functionality to load these libraries in a
platform-independent manner.

That's a huge gain for a very minor amount of additional code (IMHO).

Besides, I don't see a problem if this "require" is provided as part
of the baselib, instead of the core language.

- Christian