On Dec 27, 2006, at 7:50 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
But it is quite a challenge to search and find the
community contributed libraries. I think it would be wonderful
if the
community would select and bless certain libraries as standard.
Make
them available for the various platforms compiled and ready to use.
Agree! It could be blessed in the way the the official lua
developers
take the lead. Set up a link on front web page (or some where
else, very
visible) "here you find the standard libs we are working on".
How do CPAN work? Do the libraries there have any blessing from the
Benevolent Dictator for Life?
-- Roberto
CPAN libraries don't have BDFL approval. But the standard libraries
for Perl, Python, and even Ruby are much larger than that of Lua.
I don't think larger standard libraries are appropriate for Lua,
but I do agree with other posters that Lua could benefit from a
more standardized mechanism for distributing libraries on the major
platforms (Linux, Darwin, Windows, etc.). I've been learning more
about gcc, ld, make, etc. than I ever thought I would in simply
trying to get lrexlib compiled on my Mac. apt-get on Debian, or
fink on Mac, would seem to be good models. It might be nice to have
an official effort to clean up the libraries on LuaForge to be
compatible with Tecmake, so that they're more cross-platform. For
example, I think my problem with lrexlib is that I've been bumping
up against a Linux assumption in trying to get it compiled and linked.
I've been tempted to drop Lua in favor of Perl, Ruby or PLT Scheme,
but I just "get" Lua so much more easily than I get the other
scripting languages. Lua really only needs a little more
functionality (regexps, POSIX) for my particular purposes, so I'm
willing to learn a little more about the GNU tool set and the
differences between compilation on Linux and Darwin to get what I
need. Its design is just so much cleaner than Perl, Python, or Ruby
(particularly where scoping and closures are concerned), and its
syntax is much more readable than that of Scheme.
Mike
