Re: Luna: A scripting App for the iPad

[Greg Falcon <veloso@...>]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:02 AM, ObjectiveCeeds
<info@objectiveceeds.com> wrote:
> The first version was just a test. Running an embedded scripting engine violates the terms of the App Store. I disabled all functions, especially with a focus on threading or IO handling and such things. You only had the "raw" syntax of Lua. It was just a test, if Apple would accept this kind of application and I don't wanted to spend many hours in an App, that will be rejected. Apple did not reject this App, and to be honest, this was a surprise for me.

Unfortunately this decision has made Luna close to unusable.  I tried
the app out, and struggled with the fact that none of the standard
library is present.  What little of the standard library you
reimplemented, you reimplemented with different names.  Why?

Luna's print() has different semantics than Lua's.  log() is closer to
Lua's print(), but it doesn't call tostring() on its arguments.  In
fact, there is no tostring().

There's no setmetatable() or type() or select() or pcall() or
string.char() or coroutine.create() or pairs().  (pairs()!!)

This is not just a consistency argument.  These missing standard
library functions are blocking off huge parts of Lua's functionality.
It's hard to get much of anything useful done without them.

Greg F