(from comp.lang.misc) Calling all Lua and/or Tk aficionados

[Robert Raschke <r.raschke@...>]

Hi,

there is a lua mailing list to which you should probably subscribe if
you want superb expert advice. See http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html for
more info on the mailing list.

I'm taking the liberty of forwarding your questions.

Robby

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• Subject: Calling all Lua and/or Tk aficionados
• From: Paul Chapman <paul@...>
• Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:48:29 +0100

I've been looking again at designing a functional-ish/OO-ish language for a
programmable CA editor.

Yesterday I took a first look at Lua, which appears to contain some ideas
which I have independently come up with in the past couple of years, in
particular the unification of indexed collections (one-dimensional arrays)
and keyed collections (dictionaries/hashtables) as a fundamental datatype.

I was wondering if anyone here had looked at Lua, and could explain the
advantage to the programmer of "permissive" rules when matching the lengths
of parameter and argument lists, and of left and right sides of multiple
assignments - ie discarding extra rvalues or filling extra lvalues with
nils.

Are there any other languages which do this?

At first glance, I would tend to be strict about length matching, because
this would tend to reduce programmer error.

Also, Lua/Tk is mentioned in one of the articles on the Lua site.

Can Tk be used independently from Tcl as a standalone API?  Ie, can Tk be
used to write reasonably platform-independent GUIs?  If I design and
implement my language in, say, Java, can I call Tk from Java for all my GUI
stuff in more or less the same way on all platforms?

Cheers, Paul

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