Thoughts on an alternative Lua build environment.

["Joseph Stewart" <joseph.stewart@...>]

Hello all,

There have been several threads here lately that have "tickled my brain" to think about a possibly better way to build Lua.

Chris' recent thread about "inline Lua" along with my experiments to add a datatype and another lexical element to Lua have me thinking that we might benefit from embedding the source code of Lua into one or more Lua-script(s) which generate C-code and Makefiles.

Is this complete heresy? Maybe I've been reading too many Lisp papers lately, but I have a sneaking feeling that we could better "parameter-ize" Lua this way than the typical #ifdef method (while kudos certainly go to the authors for keeping a MUCH cleaner code-base that most OSS projects).

I'm not sure I'd take the same approach, but here's a link to a paper that demonstates a "syntax-driven C preprocessor" http://swtch.com/gosling89ace.pdf.

This paper shows a preprocessor that "understands C" and implements "ace" which is a rule-based system that "operates on syntax trees".

My approach would be to embed chunks of "C" in Lua strings that are selectively concatenated into one or more real C files and a simple Makefile.

If there's any interest at all, I'll take a first-cut at morphing the Lua 5.1 code-base into this model. My first prototype would include asimple syntax modification to support Erlang-style arbitrary base constants (
i.e. 2#1000 means "the base two constant 1000" or 8) as an add-on to demonstrate the process of including a syntax change.

I humbly ask this community to let me know if I'm philosophically way off to even start down this path.

-joe