Re: TIOBE: Lua in the Top 20

[David Kastrup <dak@...>]

"Sherry Zhang" <yuleopen@gmail.com> writes:

> I became interested in lua when I heard about the LuaTeX project.
> It is great fun to embed a functional/dynamic programming language
> into TeX.  but I wonder whether Lua can do the job because it lacks
> full support for Unicode strings, and it is too slow to use Lua to
> handle the Opentype/Truetype font information, especially CJK fonts.

Handling Unicode support in TeX as compared to Lua is like shooting
yourself in the foot with a mortar rather than with lawn darts.

I'd still very much prefer a Lua variant which defaults to uninterned
strings _until_ one uses them for indexing.  But it still beats using
TeX for string manipulation.

-- 
David Kastrup