Re:Zoom out

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

John Belmonte wrote:
> So what I'm suggesting is that someone, or some group, take charge of
> this new thing. Give it a mailing list and development site. But
> most importantly, take a new perspective-- don't call it Lua, even if
> by license you can.

Mmm, maybe a separate mailing list can be a good idea, if this idea/thread
is annoying most of the users of the current mailing list.

I am not sure about a new development site. But why not again, unless it
receives semi-official recognition (see below).

But I don't see why it shouldn't be called Lua.
The core is Lua. The syntax is still Lua's one. As you say, the licence thus
allows to call this "Lua".
The result (an exe able to load libraries) is not the official Lua.exe per
se, but a non-official (?) distribution of Lua, like CGILua for example.
Nothing wrong with it.
Actually, in a sense, the official libraries of Lua, despite the Ansi C
respect, are not Lua either. They form an extension of Lua, not suited for all
environments (most notably the system functions).

I agree, this project must not be in the official Lua release, since it is
beyond the scope of the language, and it cannot be written in Ansi C, which is
a strong and good requirement of the sources.
But still, it can have an official status, like "the recommended system to
bind new libraries dynamically", to avoid concurrent, and incompatible
systems. The official state of this extension can be of generic scope, ie. without
source, which will be system dependent anyway. But it can be a set of
requirements, to indicate where to find the libraries, how to manage namespaces,
versions, etc.

Last note: the version is actually paramount. Since the Lua authors can
completely break the API to make it better, and I think that's a good thing, it
will break the existing libraries and make them useless, until someone rewrite
them. See the Lua 3.2 glLua for example.
Somehow, getting the version number of a library should even be independent
of the API...

Regards.

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