Although I found the project very interesting (and with a cool name
too..), sounds to me you´re playing a very dangerous game.
Either you will become popular and benefit from Lua´s popularity for
being lua-related, or you will be cast aside for not being completely
Lua compatible.
That scenario becomes even uglier when you have a lot of
community-supported modules built for Lua - that might not be
compatible with Idle (since your main efforts, as I see, are not aiming
for compatibility).
In any case, I am afraid you´re dividing efforts - one of the main
dangers in the free software world.
I am pretty sure a lot of people will welcome your work to introduce
new features into Lua, but would also love to see them pluggable into
the standard Lua virtual machine.
Maybe in a future version of Lua (with better suport for extending the
interpreter and compiler) the average Lua bundle might very well
achieve the same level of functionality as Idle, with a few packages
installed under the sound of rolling Rocks.. :-)
Anyway, congratulations on what seems to be a very nice work.
Thomas Lauer escreveu:
Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
Idle is basically a script language based on Lua.
From the docs, it seems to me that Idle *is* Lua. Questions #3 and #4
in http://idle.thomaslauer.com/IdleFAQ.html imply that Idle is Lua plus
a few extensions. I'm not sure this warrants a new name. I think you
and all of us would be better served with a name containing 'Lua' or
something related to it in it.
Well, that's one of the areas where it gets murky. My understanding (and
firm expectation) is that something that ends with .lua MUST run with a
standard lua interpreter/compiler. Naming a file xyz.lua promises in
effect that inside xyz.lua is genuine Lua, nothing more and nothing
less.
However, any non-trivial Idle program will NOT run with standard Lua.
This starts with the (*currently* relatively minor) language extensions,
but the main point of difference is the runtime library. One function,
and you're doomed:-). The interdependence between the various layers is
just too complex to have this run with standard Lua. I tried pretty hard
to achieve that but I failed relatively early in development. Either the
problem is too hard or I am too dumb. Or both;-).
Plus there are some things that I had to change internally (i.e. in Lua)
that may or may not create nasty problems with a standard Lua binary.
At any rate, Idle (the interpreter and compiler) is a greedy beast: it
will devour whatever you hand it, whether that's called .lua or .idle or
.longestextensionintheworld. So anyone not happy with that extension can
easily change this in his or her setup. Or stick with Lua.
Because, last but not least, the main audience for Idle, as I wrote in
my post, is not necessarily the Lua aficionado. Most people on the list
can and have and will tweak Lua until it fits. Many others, most of whom
may never have heard of Lua, can't.
Well, my 2c.
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