Re: pseudo self modifying code?

[Ben Kelly <ranavin@...>]

On Tuesday 01 February 2011 13:56:37 Patrick Mc(avery wrote:
> Rather then using a DB or tables & Pluto I was thinking about storing
> information in Lua scripts that would then be executed by other Lua
> scripts via dofile. I was thinking that the executing script could also
> modify the storage script for persistence. This set up would also allow
> me to hand edit the storage script later, bypassing the main limitation
> I see with a DB or a serialization library like Pluto.
> 
> Is there a proper name for this? Is there any code out there that I
> could use as a template?
> 
> Thanks for reading-Patrick

This is a fairly common usage; lua code is easy to generate, easy for humans 
to read, and easy to load, so it's a good choice for a human-and-machine-
writeable config file format (and similar uses). You can see real-world examples 
of this, in for example, Supreme Commander (which uses machine-edited lua 
scripts for game configuration, save files, and maps, among other things).

The information on table serialization in the wiki[1] might be of interest to 
you; among other things it discusses serializing a table to Lua source. Once 
you have that you can just store the info in a table at runtime, load it from 
disk at startup with dofile and save the updated version at shutdown with your 
serializer of choice.

	Ben Kelly

[1] http://lua-users.org/wiki/TableSerialization