Re: Project lead nominations for standard libraries?

[Dirk Laurie <dpl@...>]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2011 at 07:59:16PM +0200, David J. Slate wrote:
> I'm a big fan of Lua's syntactic and semantic simplicity, which 
> helped me to get up to speed quickly to make productive use of it.

And so say all of us. 

This thread started by suggesting that the need for almost-standard 
libraries is so great that we need a well-coordinated project to 
create them, headed by someone experienced who is also a nice person.  
The handful of people who might qualify on both counts quickly declined 
the honour, and we have since then strayed quite a bit from the original 
theme.  

As usual.

I find myself ambivalent on this question.  On the one hand,
a well-designed set of extensions can be tremendously useful; on 
the other it is instructive, and so much fun, to write one's own.

We could have the best of both worlds if we standardized not so
much the libraries themselves as their namespaces.  No need for the
actual code to exist yet.

For example, several people seem to like the idea of routines that 
operate on holed arrays.  Even though I think it is a totally futile
effort, I would support a proposal that the name holed_array be 
reserved for the prototype of these objects, without waiting until
proponents of the notion can find agreement on the semantics of __len.
Then they can head their posts to have "holed_array" in the title,
making life easier both for those who are eagerly awaiting the next
installment and those who, well, aren't.

And if a post discussing such a proposal summarizes its main point
in the form of a BibTeX-like Lua statement, e.g.

PROPOSAL{"holed_array", purpose="arrays with holes", history=[[
Discussed extensively on lua-l, starting in December 2010.
]]}

it will be easy for someone who likes the idea to append that 
statement to a personal file of suggestions for almost-standard 
libraries, and if after some time, some sufficiently well-organized 
people are willing to share their versions of that file and the Lua
program that reads and prettyprints it with the rest of us, we will 
have achieved much of our purpose without actually needing to appoint 
a benevolent dictator beforehand.

Dirk