Re: History of Lua aside... note about game usage!

["Michael Casaday" <meeper@...>]

I'm involved with an independent, amateur game project code-named "Gilbert".
I first heard about Lua from an update about it at flipcode.com.  I brought
Lua to the programmers' attention when the subject of a scripting language
came up.  They were going to go ahead and roll their own language, but the
complexity of that non-trivial task swung them toward Lua.  So I'll probably
be able to write Lua scripts for our game and enter Lua statements into the
game's console sometime soon.  From my own - admittedly superficial -
investigations, none of the other languages I looked at really attempt to
make application integration particularly easy.  By contrast, Lua is
surprisingly simple to integrate.  Also, some of the other languages seem a
bit bloated for our relatively simple needs.  Python and Tcl, for instance,
are very cool languages, but they do far too much for a game like ours,
which requires only simple scripting capabilities.  Yes, it is probably not
too difficult to strip out what you don't need from those languages, but why
not just use something that doesn't need to be slimmed down in the first
place?  I looked at Small and I glanced at SimKin, but it seemed like the
former wasn't really a scripting language since it required compilation into
byte codes (someone correct me if I'm wrong), and the XML-oriented approach
that the latter took just rubbed me the wrong way.

I think you did a great job on the language.  I'd love to add our project to
The List <tm> when we are finished.

_________________________
mike casaday