Re: Recommendations on my upcoming Lua presentation?

[marbux <marbux@...>]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> It's been a long time but I seem to remember DOS (and therefore presumably
> Windows) having piping and redirection, and years ago Borland Turbo C came
> with a version of grep, and there now exists a grep for windows
> (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm), so it is pretty much
> portable, and given that it's a one liner, if you have to change a few things
> that's five minutes.
>
> As far as Mac, my understanding is that OS/x is BSD underneath, and if so then
> it would be portable to Mac.

Yes, and there's also Cygwin, which provides quite a variety of
Linux/Unix utilities for Windows. <http://www.cygwin.com/>.

But our experience in persuading users to install software for use by
scripts is pretty grim. For example, we have an incredibly useful Lua
script for opening a outline node's content in a plain text editor to
check or edit HTML source. But it requires that users install a text
editor that supports UTF-8 without BOM.

Judging from the number of support requests from users who've trashed
their documents using Windows NotePad with that script rather than an
editor with the right character encoding, not enough users are
interested in taking the time to install other software for use in
scripts. So we tend to roll our own portable solutions in Lua and/or
an API.

Best regards,

Paul

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