Re: [ANN] Lua For Windows v5.1.3.12 released

["Sebastien Loisel" <loisel@...>]

Dear Andrew,

Thank you for your email.

> Thanks for the feedback, we'll make improvements based on feedback.

That sounds great. Just now, I decided to see what else I could find out, so I played around with SciTE and opened hello.lua in the editor. It seems like the "Run Program" and "Launch Interactive Lua" buttons interact poorly. When the program ends, it seems like the Lua session is killed. Then, I can click anywhere in the terminal pane, and the cursor goes there. I can edit the contents of the terminal pane, but that does not seem to make any sense. Then, I click on "Launch Interactive Lua" again, and I couldn't see a new prompt. I was typing in the terminal pane, but the cursor was somewhere random. After typing some more, I eventually got a prompt, and then I had the following interaction:

>print "hello, world"
variable 'rint' is not declared
stdin:1: attempt to call global 'rint' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
    stdin:1: in main chunk
    [C]: ?
> print "hello, world"
'hello, world'

So apparently, it lost the 'p' of my 'print' on the first try. Then, I tried the "Load Lua File into Interactive Session" button. When I clicked it, I got the following mysterious message:

> Lua 5.1!
true

which looks like only a fraction of the hello.lua program.

I don't know if it's my place to make suggestions, but I'll try one and you just tell me if you don't need my suggestions.

I was thinking that it doesn't really need to work like this. As long as the console pane is open, it should be bound to a given Lua interpreter. You don't really need the button to start an interpreter -- although if you want multiple interpreters, you could have an "open new console pane" button, but each console pane should be permanently attached to an interpreter, in my opinion. So if you hardwire the single console pane into your editor, you don't need the button, I think.

For the other two buttons, it seems like they attempt to do the same thing two different ways. Again, in my opinion, you should have a button that copy-pastes the entire buffer into the console window, and that's all you need. If you look at MATLAB, it also has a variety of good ways of doing this (are you familiar with MATLAB?) In MATLAB, what you can do is select a portion of your buffer, then hit F9, and it just pastes it into your console pane. In addition, MATLAB has something they call "cell mode". In Cell Mode, your script is divided into cells. Cells are separated by comments that begin with %%. When you hit CTRL-Enter, it automatically copies and pastes the entire contents of the cell where your cursor is, to the console pane.

I'm not saying that's how you have to do it, I'm just saying that there's room for different ways of executing the code you're editing, but it seems to me like what your editor is doing now is... not following the principle of least surprise?

Thank you very much for LfW, it is a very interesting program and I am looking forward to future versions and improvement!

Sincerely,

Sébastien Loisel


-- 
Sébastien Loisel