I would like to suggest some credit to be attributed to the
originator of the bit library in the 5.2 documentation, I think it
was Reuben Thomas' bit library that was the popular one but I don't
know of prior history. Even if bit32 is totally original code, there
is a chain of significant prior work in this area.
We are very grateful to Reubem Thomas, not only for the bit library
inspiration but for many other contributions he has offered to Lua over
the years.
However, many other parts of Lua have chains of significant prior work.
Stephan Hermann and Edgar Toernig opened the way for metatables; Tatcher
Ulrich did the first implementation of assimetric coroutines; etc. etc.
Not to mention significant prior work in programming languages in
general that we borrowed.
When we write about Lua (e.g., [1]) we try to give proper credit to
all significant prior work, being it from the Lua community or not;
we surely will give proper credit to Reuben if we write about the bit
library. We also have a "thank" section in the site [2]. (It needs to be
updated, but Reuben is already there.) But we do not think we can add
all these acknowledgments in the reference manual.
[1] The Evolution of Lua. http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
[2] http://www.lua.org/thanks.html#individuals
