Re: [ANN] GSL Shell new beta release with anti-gran graphics module

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:04 PM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> Norman Ramsey <nr@cs.tufts.edu> writes:
>> (I'm also frustrated that the library support for functional
>> programming is poor---table.map is a function I had to define myself.)
>
> So you are frustrated that Lua is not Haskell or Scheme.  Other people
> are frustrated because it is not C++ or Ada.
>
> I would be frustrated when Lua were not Lua.


Francesco,

Obviously people feel stongly about syntax, eh! :-)

Personally, I am among those that wish that lua syntax for anonymous
functions was less verbose, too, so I understand why you would want to
extend the syntax for gslshell. One place where every keystroke
actually does count is interactive shells.

That aside, a practical thing you should consider is that you are
creating lua dialect, and code written in it is no longer portable.

I hope that the gsl module itself does not depend on your dialect, so
that it can be used in contexts outside of the "shell".

I tried to verify this by building the gsl module against the system
lua5.1 to see if I can use it independently of the shell, but I don't
have enough of its dependencies installed (or time), to do this now.

Do you expect the gsl module to be useable independently of your
shell? The graphing capability in particular caught my attention.

Cheers,
Sam