Re: Standard general purpose library (was: lposix library for Lua 5.1)

[Natanael Copa <natanael.copa@...>]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:16:16 -0500
Rici Lake <lua@ricilake.net> wrote:

> 
> On 16-Oct-06, at 7:02 PM, Natanael Copa wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:10:40 -0400
> > Ralph Hempel <rhempel@hempeldesigngroup.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Build a standard library that a majority uses and can be made
> >> partially loadable and you have a winner.
> >
> > What would be required make this a reallity and not just talk?
> >
> > Would trying to collect all current libs (like luafilesystem and
> > lposix) and list all functions be a start?
> >
> > Where could this be done? On wiki?
> 
> That was kind of the point of
> http://lua-users.org/wiki/ExtensionProposal
> 
> The idea was to define interfaces (that is, how functions would work if
> implemented), and collect implementations for particular OS's. (At
> least, that was my idea :) ). I don't know that there is consensus on
> this idea, but it seems more reasonable to me than having every OS
> interface be idiosyncratically different and under-documented.

Agree. There might still be room for a posix lib for posix specific things.
 
> I think this is orthogonal to CPAN and PEAR. That is, it only attempts
> to specify OS-specific interfaces, and only those OS-specific
> interfaces which are likely to be implementable on more than one OS.

As I wrote in the other mail, this could be a part of a bigger picture if you splitted up the funcs into catecories instead of having just one generic "ex" namespace.

I am not saying you (or someone else) are going to write everything
yourself, but if everyone atleast can agree on one API we could avoid
the overlapping funcs.

I'd say that second step would be to collect whats already out there.
Some things might be added as they are (like luafilesystem, luasockets
etc) and some things will need to be stripped down. Things that has
overlapping funcs.

Natanael Copa