Re: Suggestion, Lua Sizes

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Patrick once stated:
> I have a suggestion.... why not divide the language into sizes? For 
> instance lets say standard, vanilla, PUC Lua was size 3. Size 2 could be 
> the same Lua shipping with long int's and size 1 could be Lua shipping 
> with plain int, or something like this, others would be better qualified 
> to sort this.

  There are problems with this.  I might want to keep Lua with doubles, but
dump the compiler and only deal with Lua bytecodes.  Or I might want a Lua
with long ints, the compiler, but not the standard libraries (table.*, io.*,
etc).  

  I think there are two classes of people, those who embed Lua and thus,
can deal with changing lua_Number to a long int, or excluding certain
portions of Lua, and what not.  Then there are the people who want to use
Lua as Lua and tend to use the Lua standalone interpreter much as one would
use python or perl or ruby.  These people want the batteries to be included.

  Me, I work with Lua as a library, so I don't particularly care if the
batteries are included (I rather like it as it, sans batteries).  But that's
my preference.

  -spc