Lua Encyclopedia (Re: Back to Books)

["Peter Hill" <corwin@...>]

Peter Hill:
> As Lua is open source it is reasonable that its manual would be as well.

Andy Stark:
> I had this very same thought myself a few months ago and started work on
> something with a suitably pretentious name: the Alternative Lua Annotated
> Reference Manual (ALARM). It's important to have a good name first and
> then build a project around it, I always think.
>
> ALARM mainly contains material adapted from the official Lua
> Reference Manual, but in an encyclopedia-like form.


Andy Stark
> The main format of the data would be XML,

What!?!? You heathen! Why use XML when you can use the marvelous Lua for
data definition! ;-P

Seriously, though, have you actually considered converting the manual to a
Lua data format? It sort of makes sense... and it becomes easy for a Lua
user to extract the pieces they want.


> And now, having built you up...  unfortunately, I never actually finished
> the ALARM; in particular, I couldn't think of interesting code examples
> since I am really a newcomer to Lua. And it was for Lua 4 rather than 5.
> And I wasn't sure about some of the technical information. BUT STILL, I
> think the ALARM might lend itself very nicely to a collaborative "open
> source" documentation project.

Perhaps you should pop it on the Wiki and then tell the list it's there?

Then again... maybe the whole thing (being encyclopedic in nature) might be
more applicable as a set of Wiki entires. What do people think?

Or perhaps have it in Lua format and have some sort of Lua program
auto-create a Lua Dictionary Wiki from the data? That sounds good :-).


Does anyone know if one can upload and/or download such chunks of a Wiki at
a single time?

*cheers*
Peter Hill.