Re: Lua libraries

[David Jeske <jeske@...>]

In reading this thread, it seems to me like some people are talking
about "lua libraries and modules" in the interest of making Lua more
useful as a general purpose scripting language like Python and Perl. I
have a few thoughts on this I'd like to share.

My impression is that the "lua standard library workshop" is really
about just that, changes to the lua standard library. It's still going
to be built into lua, and lua is still going to be primarily an
embedded language.

I believe that any attempt to make a widespread set of standard
libraries for Lua will probably be kludgy. All the intersting
"prototyped objects" features which make Lua interesting for
exploratory embedded programming are a problem when it comes to
packaging up a bunch of code in a standard way. First, there would be
discussion about standardizing on one class-ish model, then there
would be talk of adding exceptions to Lua, and at the end we'd have
something which was basically like Perl or Python with 1/10 of the
available modules.

Anyhow, that's my $0.02.

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net