Re: [ANN] Pretty Printer for Lua

[zOOn <andrew_zhilin@...>]

Fabien <fleutot+lua <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Was there a reason not to start from Metalua's "match" extension, 
> other than the fun to redo everything from scratch for the sake of it? 


I do not think that metalua fits better than XTC Rats! + Scala for compiler 
writing :)

I checked metalua in 2007 (version 0.2 alpha, if I recall it right) before I 
began my work - and didn't find anything vital for my purposes. Front-end was 
hand-written, pattern-matching algorithm was naive. 

Most of all I disliked compilation to bytecode only - because of the lack of 
compatibilty with 5.0.x and LuaPlus (compatibility was essential for me) and 
tricky debugging (AST dump only). Also, I didn't like that even bytecode had 
runtime dependencies.

BTW, why metalua compiles to bytecode - because of goto?

Cheers,
     Andrew