Re: PUC Lua

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 09/05/2011 11.44, Henning Diedrich wrote:
> On 5/9/11 6:50 AM, Lorenzo Donati wrote:
> > To sum up: I think that the best strategy when talking about Lua in a
> > neutral way is to introduce the audience to the nature of Lua and its
> > ecosystem beforehand.
>
> Hi Lorenzo,
>
> writing docs, I like to provide for the reality that people don't read
> top down without skipping ahead! Or get familiar with the parts of the
> ecosystem that would have provided the background.

Fair enough, indeed.

> Doing benchmarks, specifically, I'd appreciate if there was a short,
> clearly defined label to distinguish the original Lua VM from the LuaJIT
> VM. At best, something that does tell people, hey, there's something I
> don't know how to interpret, if they should run into it and not
> understand it. 'Original Lua VM' does not really fit the bill, for a
> couple of reasons.
>
> It's but a practical question. Of course it will solve itself over time,
> something will stick.

Well, I think that something has already stuck. For what I've seen in 
this couple of years on the list and examining the archives and the 
WIKI, from a pure practical point of view (see continuation below).

> Lua 5.1.4 vs LuaJIT 2 works well, except that LuaJIT 2 will give as its
> version Lua 5.1, rightly so. This will become important once the core
> community shifts to 5.2 and the rift between the original and JIT world
> will be more pronounced. So while those tags are correct, to me, they
> don't seem to be quite clear enough.

As you point out, "Lua 5.1.4" vs. "LuaJIT 2" works well, but this 
requires that one has at least a superficial knowledge of what Lua and 
LuaJIT are (so a little bit of "ecosystem" knowledge is mandatory here, 
IMO).

If you're looking for a tag that will convey all the information to the 
unaware, I fear you will never be really satisfied. There is not even a 
clearly specified numbering convention for PUC Lua versions (I read 
something on an old thread on how to compare Lua version numbers, and 
that issue came out). I think that even Mike Pall hasn't specified a 
strict numbering scheme for LuaJIT and its future versions (not to 
mention other forks/variants already mentioned in another branch of this 
thread).

So knowing a bit of the ecosystem is unavoidable, IMO, whatever label 
you could devise to indicate the two (or more) things.

There is no enough room in a "standard report column header" to 
communicate all this complexity! :-)

No matter what, Lua reality is rather complex and multifaceted (as I 
discovered with time) - and still not very known among the wider 
audience (I suspect that most scientists have heard of languages such as 
Python, Javascript or Java, but -alas! - very few know something about 
Lua).

That's also a consequence of Lua's reality being no-hype. No Lua 
"evangelists" here, only enthusiasts! Let religion out of technical 
matters! Amen! hooray! :-D


From a very practical POV the only useful thing, IMHO, is to stick to 
denominations widespread in the community and add a footnote to the 
report with caveats and pointers for the unaware (maybe a first level, 
boilerplate, 4-6 liner, with essential infos, containing further links 
to the official docs or other relevant resources).

After all, whoever reads a technical report should know how to read 
technical papers if pointed in the right direction.


> Best,
> Henning


Cheers!

--
Lorenzo