Re[2]: Lua and Neko comparison

[Gunnar Zötl <gz@...>]

Hello there,

CM> gorilla, if you're talking about scripting languages. And if Lua
CM> syntax were "Javascript compatible" that would go a long way
CM> toward making an argument for it. As it is, using 'and' rather
CM> than '&&', '~=' rather than '!=' and '--' rather than '//' are just showstoppers.

not so sure about this. If it looks like Javascript, people will
expect it to behave in a similar fashion. I can see, why C++, Java,
C#, Javascript and so on would use a syntax familiar to the C
programmer, but when reading books about those languages, you will
also quite often have paragraphs detailing the differences of this or
that syntactic construct to the same-looking in C or one of the other
lookalikes.

If you talk about oddball syntaxes, perl would have to be my first
choice amongst the mainstream programming languages. I am not even
sure wether its syntax is deterministic without the semantics... and
nonetheless it has a huge community. My guess is that perl is so
popular because of CPAN. Most of the actual day-to-day small scale
programming stuff is a no-brainer in perl, because basically you go
"cpan install whateveryouneed", write some glue, and you're done
(syntax may vary, as perl comes with so many modules nowadays that
using CPAN isn't even necessary most of the time...). Without CPAN,
most people I know would rather have their fingernails torn out than
use perl for anything even halfway serious... other then text
mangling, that is ;-)

Gunnar