Lua sources (was Re: Anyone have a 5.2 .... )

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@...>]

In message 
<CAM=e0-pxJHxqKZZ7mrwcAhfSqnm90-Kg27JRdVrE54RWJx9hVw@mail.gmail.com> 
you wrote:

> > So eventually I used only the minimal version of the patch. It looks like
> > I may have avoided some problems in keeping the patch uptodate by doing
> > that.
 
> I was very happy to find your version of the patch :)

Everybody rightly praises the clarity and style of the Lua source code.
I hope that I do not sound ungrateful when I say that there will
always be muddle-heads like myself for whom no source code can ever be
clear enough, modular enough or documented enough. It is stressed
that the VM presented by the Lua distribution is simply an implementation,
and separate from the language itself. However, it is quite hard to
disentangle the VM from the language in the sources. If somebody were 
to ask a keen graduate student to fashion a different implementation 
of the language, let us say by directly executing a parse tree, the way 
gawk does (as opposed to mawk which takes the VM strategy) which source 
files can our student safely leave alone and which should she be seeking 
to replace? I find the LuaJIT sources even harder to understand. But I
realize that these remarks are more a lament for my declining powers of
concentration than useful criticism.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/