RE: origins of Lua

["Richard Ranft" <rranft@...>]

> ----
>
> On 8/7/05, Uli Kusterer <witness.of.teachtext@gmx.net> wrote:
> > .....  Yes, they *could* be attributed to CLU, but the author
> > apparently didn't get the idea to add those features until
> > seeing Modula and C++.
>
> That is the point, and that is the source of my curiosity.
> How does it happen so that certain features go unnoticed
> until seen elsewhere?  Maybe it is because of how features
> combine?  Or how successful language authors are in
> popularizing those features?  In this case, Lua's creators
> apparently knew CLU rather well, but it was not this language
> from which they felt they would borrow, say, `anywhere-
> declarations'.  So, how does the anywhere-declaration style
> look better in C++ than in CLU?

Well, perhaps they were not very conversant in CLU.  There are tons of
features in C/C++ that I don't know about, and I've been playing with it for
8 years now (not a professional programmer).  I've played with languages
like Pascal (Delphi and C++ Builder, actually) and Assembly (80x86 and 6502)
but I'm no expert, so I could easily attribute a cool feature to another
language simply because I never got around to learning that feature in the
older language.

I'm not trying to be offensive either, just practical and pragmatic (and
redundant, apparently).

All in good fun and in the spirit of debate....

Richard Ranft