Re: [ANN] libmc

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Leaf Storm<leafstormrush@gmail.com> wrote:
> and Penlight. Some of the ideas on my wishlist page notwithstanding,
> the libmc idea is to fill in the stuff Lua doesn't provide, and
> Penlight's is to do that and add stuff - like the lexer, the
> 'pl.input' module, the file tools, etc.

I've been looking at the wishlist and wondering about that as well ;)

http://bitbucket.org/leafstorm/libmc/wiki/Wishlist

And a fine set of wishes they are - but once you have implemented
them, you are going to get that 35K up to 190K which is the size of
the Penlight source.  I like small & focussed myself, hate huge big
frameworks, so I understand the motivation.  The way out of the
(apparent) difficulty is a philosophy which C++ people call 'Don't
have to pay for what you don't use', i.e. don't bring in the kitchen
sink if the user just wants a split() function.  PL uses lazy loading,
that is, require 'pl' does not bring in all that 190K, but as soon as
say tablex is referenced, that module will be loaded.

I see you mention 'algebraic and geometric' formulae, definitely
useful, but not to everyone. That probably ought to be a standalone
module of its own. It would e.g. be cool to have the basic statistics
functions like std dev, etc available.

XML generation - I don't know the Python library, but it's a pity that
there is no DOM implementation AFAIK that could be used with luaexpat,
or no XML prettyprinter that could work on the same LOM format.  In
that case, I would probably try to motivate it as an add-on to
LuaExpat (i.e. something like lxp.dom and lxp.writer).

Unit conversions: documentation is a little patchy (par for the
course) but this seems to work very well:

http://luaforge.net/projects/luadc

steve d.