On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:02 PM, ObjectiveCeeds
<info@objectiveceeds.com> wrote:
First I must say, that I did not know the strong relationship between the language itself and the librarys of Lua. As C / Objecive-C developer these are two different things. Of course, they depend on each other, offer basic functionality and fundamental patterns, but these are two separate things.
There's very little difference between Lua libraries and C/Objective-C libraries. However, you've gone further than libraries. Lua tables are like C arrays. Would a C program without arrays qualify as C syntax? Imagine C without arrays, for loops, while loops.....that's what you've done to Lua. Leaving off libraries is one thing, but leaving off parts of the language is another.
So when I was saying, to have Lua on the iPad, it really just means, that it uses the Lua syntax.
OK, I should make it clear:
It's not the goal of Luna, to offer a full featured Lua engine with syntax and all it's libs!
As far as libraries, no one is likely to ask you to port everything on LuaRocks. We just want the C equivalents of stdio, stdlib, etc. Coroutines are not threads, but if you want to leave them off for now that's understandable. Leaving the os and debug libraries off on a sandboxed device also makes sense. But there's not a whole lot you can do without the standard file, io, math, package, string, and table libraries.
Luna will have it's own library. It will offer functions, to write easy scripts that allow you to play around and it will use features of the iPad. There won't be a way to dispatch threads or things like these. And it does not have the aim to be an alternative for Cocoa systems (I use Cocoa for this :-) )
Well, I got to point this out in the documentation of the next release. It will be different from that, what you call Lua. It's just Lua like.
May I ask why? You've just exchanged a number of messages with a large list, many of who would be potential customers. We understand the need to sandbox some features, but the closer to stock Lua syntax, the better.
Good luck! Keep us posted on the next release.
