Re: [ANN] Idle Script - pre-alpha release

[Thomas Lauer <thomas.lauer@...>]

Luís Santos <lsantos@itquality.com.br> wrote:

> 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, 

That's fine with me;-)

> or you will be cast aside for not being completely Lua compatible.

That's fine as well. I am doing this mostly because I need it myself (or
just because I want to have it). Some people write books, others tend a
garden. I do Idle.

The main audience for such a project (at least as I conceived it) may
never have even heard of Lua, much less be concerned with questions of
compatibility. As I said in another post, everybody who is concerned
with these things should by all means stick with Lua.

> In any case, I am afraid you´re dividing efforts - one of the main 
> dangers in the free software world.

It's a danger but also an opportunity. The thing is either you do
something or you don't. There are already long threads in the list about
extending the runtime library, about what should go into it and what
shouldn't, about Posix support and Windows features, et cetera. These
are important discussions, no question, but at some point there has to
be action. (I am probably simply too impatient, always was.)

> I am pretty sure a lot of people will welcome your work to introduce new 
> features into Lua

That's not at all what Idle is about.

> but would also love to see them pluggable into the 
> standard Lua virtual machine.

No problem. I could at some point try to create a pluggable version. The
main thing is that the current Lua sources would need some changes
(nothing earth-shattering, mind you) to enable them to run (with) the
Idle libraries.

(I have a rough-and-tumble version that more or less runs with standard
Lua but I just HATE the idea that subtle differences between the way the
two binaries do their respective jobs might wreak havoc on unsuspecting
users. These things can introduce bugs that are nearly impossible to
track down.)

We'll see.

-- 
cheers  thomasl

web : http://thomaslauer.com/start