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Ken Smith wrote:
I actually did try using lposix and lfs. Ex looks similar enough that I didn't bother with it as well. Python was simpy the better tool for the job. It happened that I needed to compute SHA-1 sums and Python had a module for it. The Python implementation ended up being faster, probably owing to os.walk() being faster than explicit iteration with the methods provided by lposix and lfs. The native SHA-1 support was also certainly better than doing a popen to sha1sum. Although I find Lua to be a fantastic language, I must say that it has not usurped the other tools in my toolkit just yet.
There is LuaCrypto http://luacrypto.luaforge.net/ which is a bind to the OpenSSL library. I've used it to generate cryptographically secure random numbers as well as SHA-1 digests.
local evp_new = require "crypto.evp".new
local rand_bytes = require "crypto.rand".bytes
-- generate a session id
local function make_id(expires, email)
return evp_new"sha1"
:update(expires)
:update(email)
:update(assert(rand_bytes(64)))
:digest()
end
As far as providing a function like Python's os.walk, lposix could
certainly provide a wrapper for the POSIX ftw() and nftw() functions.
What stopped you from adding it? :)
The "ex" API doesn't try to provide such a function because it tries to be as low-level as possible while still being as generic (portable) as possible. It's easy to build such a function in Lua on top of either os.dir from "ex" or both os.dir and os.attributes from lfs (LuaFileSystem).
I do understand your point, however. Lua indeed does not have an extensive standard library, and for this reason it isn't an excellent choice for a stand-alone language. But it has other attributes which make it much nicer to use for extending and embedding than most other languages.
-Mark