Re: origins of Lua

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> How does it happen so that certain features go unnoticed
> until seen elsewhere?

I never programmed with CLU. I did not know CLU rather well. I read
several papers about CLU, but that was long ago. It is easy to remember
its exciting novelties (iterators, the handling of internal x external
data representations) and easy to forget some details (e.g., syntax).

I programmed with Modula for quite a while and with C++ for longer than
I should. So it is easier to remember their details.
  
Lua was not created as an "academic" language. We did not reread old
papers to remember those details. We got what we knew and used it.

Anyway, I must say that in some small details of that paper we may not
have been very literal. For instance, anywhere-declaration appears in
many languages, several of them older than C++. We singled C++ out
because it was popular at that time and because in C++ that feature is
more prominent due to the direct contrast with C.

-- Roberto