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

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Gavin Wraith <gavin@wra1th.plus.com> writes:
> 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.

Hmm, actually I haven't seen all that many people praising the clarity
and style of the Lua source code, and I have seen a fair number of
people saying they had a hard time understanding it.  I'm personally
of the opinion that while the structure of the implementation is
pretty good (it's nicely straight-forward and small), it could do with
a few more comments...  :]

I think the language itself is the saving grace -- its simplicity,
small size, and straight-forwardness, and the completeness of the
reference documentation, mean that even when some detail of the
implementation is a little confusing, you're never really very far
from some well-defined reference point, so a little work is all that's
needed to figure things out.  [Some things, e.g. the nuances of GC,
might be an exception to this, but nothing short of a good internals
document would really help in that case I think.]

-Miles

-- 
You can hack anything you want, with TECO and DDT.