Re: Lua Strengths/Weaknesses and usage info

[Christian Vogler <cvogler@...>]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 01:13:58PM +0200, Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> Verbose is in the eye of the beholder... In a previous thread, we
> talked about APL, which is very terse, but a bit hard to understand
> without being a disciple... Forth is a bit like that too. Perl is
> terse, but quite cryptic. Etc.  I thought that modern programming
> stress out the clarity of code over the conciseness. Ie. on
> maintenability over the comfort of the programmer (the one who write
> the code, not the one who have to maintain it!).

Those two goals are not mutually exclusive. Python is the best example
of that. As I said in my other message, lua currently is more verbose
than both *maintainable* Perl and Python, but that seems to be mostly
because of the lack of libraries.

> Yes! I see often here remarks on useful things made by mailing list
> members, but when I search for Lua source code examples on the Web,
> I don't find much... This is quite frustating, even if I understand
> that some code can't be released because of NDA, close source
> development, etc.

Right now I am waiting for lua 4.1 to be released first, before I
release utility code, because there are two key features missing:
require and weak tables. Without them the code won't run on a default
lua installation.

- Christian