Re: More thoughts on Lua 5.2

[Duck <duck@...>]

>>Optional libraries would contain officially-supported 
>>additional library code which might not be supported 
>>or portable to all platforms, and which IMO should start 
>>off with at least the following:

>>[OS-native file I/O + lfs + core of luasocket]

>Just curious, I guess - what's the rationale for making 
>these part of an official distribution?

It seems pretty important for a modern scripting language to have utility 
libraries allowing it to interact decently with the file system and with 
sockets. (PiL, for instance, goes as far as assuming that yu have 
LuaSocket when giving a real-world example of how to use coroutines.)

To me, this seems fundamental enough that officially-sanctioned libraries, 
built and tested routinely as part of Lua development, and shipped along 
with the Lua distro, are surely called for?

To me, there's a big difference between 'oh, you can fudge Lua to support 
64-bit file sizes by search-and-replacing all fseeks with fseekos and 
ftells with ftellos,' and 'choosing the correct file size bitness for 
your OS is, by design, an automatic part of the build process.'

Same sort of issue a recent poster had with the matter of building a 
floating-point-free Lua. Everyone gave theoretical details of how easy it 
is to do by tweaking luaconf -- except he'd tried this and found that it 
gave only a floating-point-reduced Lua. There can be a big difference 
between official and theoretical features in a language distro...