Re: Standard libraries (was Re: Virgin tables)

[HyperHacker <hyperhacker@...>]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 13:04, Tomas Guisasola Gorham
<tomas@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>        Hi Mark
>
>> Unfortunately, the process of defining standard libraries runs into
>> the ground whenever it comes up. Since this seems to be beyond the scope
>> of what the core Lua team wants to tackle, what would be good is if they
>> could at least settle on some designated individual or two on whom they
>> could apply some form of official blessing. This choice might be based
>> in part on submitted proposals or code as opposed to simply blessing
>> someone. But the point would be that the resulting libraries had been
>> discussed within the Lua inner sanctum in addition to being discussed
>> on more public forums like this list and through that they gained more
>> specific approval and support.
>
>        I think this "official blessing" is a dream which will never
> come true :-)  Besides, it is not necessary since there are successful
> initiatives from the community without any approval from the Lua team
> (I mean LuaSocket, LuaJIT and others).
>
>        Regards,
>                Tomás

I quite like the proposed array interface (and might end up just
implementing it in a library of my own), though array(...) somewhat
irks me - wouldn't array{...} be much more efficient in most cases?
You might provide a check (which can be toggled by something like
array.debug.ValidateInput = true if performance is a concern) that the
table can be used as an array (no holes or non-numeric args).

Of course, one great thing about Lua is that it could support both by
checking if the first parameter is a table... unless of course you
wanted to construct an array of tables. (Maybe if first param is table
and no additional params?)

As far as standard libraries go I wouldn't count on much of anything
receiving an official blessing - probably your best bet is to just
write a lot of small libraries, trying to avoid creating
incompatibilities with other peoples' libraries, offer downloads of
each individual library plus the entire bundle, and if they're good
enough they'll become widely-used enough to be a de-facto standard at
least. (That term bugs me a bit thinking of how IE did similar - but
then, it did so in the face of some existing standards.)

At some point I'll have to clean up my own little set of "standard"
libraries and release them somewhere... I suspect a lot of us have
decent collections of modules we've been keeping to ourselves because
they're messy...

-- 
Sent from my toaster.