RE: split/join

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

John Belmonte wrote:
> Erik Hougaard wrote:
> > Your are (maybe) missing my point, a message archive is not the
> > way to present Lua to new users - that will scare people away
> > compared to other languages. We need a nice indexed information
> > source with code, ltn's articles, tips tricks ... The wiki is the right
> > way to go (I have no idea about the technology behind wiki) from
> > a information indexing perspective - but there can be only one and
> > it has to be on lua.org
> 
> Some things to consider:
> 
> * Several robust wiki's are just a single cgi script.
> * If there was a wiki at tecgraf / lua.org, the Lua authors would lose the
> complete control they currently have over the site content.

Perhaps, but since the Wiki Wiki can be only a part of the site, a
disclaimer of no responsability on the Wiki content could be enough.

> * Lua users (even new ones) are not so dumb.  They didn't need a language
> that indexes arrays from 1 instead of 0.  They probably won't have
> difficulty following "links" from the Lua home page to find a listing of
> valuable Lua resources.

It is time consuming, like searching the mailing list to find the trick to
perform a case-insensitive strfind. Even if you know it exists, it can be
quite difficult to search it (which keyword? can be about gsub only after
all...).

> * Lua is an embedded language, and so code is not generally 
> portable.  This
> limits the effectiveness of exchanging sample code.

Again this discussion...
I haven't yet embedded Lua in my code yet (but I will), so currently I am
playing with the standard interpreter.
Even if you can say I better use Python or Perl, I use Lua to parse or
filter files (I am writting one to extract some textual information from
semi-binary files).
I know just enough Perl to have base understanding of scripts, I don't know
yet Python, and I have currently no time to learn them in a deep enough way.
I like Lua, its syntax and power, and speed, and size: I can write a small
script and send it to somebody else with the interpreter. Try to do this with
Python, at least with the standard package!
I am trying to master the language, so I spend most of my learning time to
it, and I am willing to use this knowledge to general scripting purpose.
Indeed, currently it is not well suited for this purpose, since you have to
recompile the interpreter to include foreign C libraries. But I hope this
will evolve.
Perhaps it is not the real purpose Lua was created for, but since the
authors released a generic interpreter, it has this capability.

As for generic code, there is probably not much full programs to be
released, yet there are a lot of code snippets that can be useful, both to learn the
language (get its flavor, learn the tricks, see examples) and to avoid
reinventing the wheel.
Such as Erik' split function, snippets found in Roberto's book (to read CSV,
to parse dates, etc.), in this mailing list, etc.

Regards.

-- 
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Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/
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