Re: What Lua can do that other programming languages can't do?

["Joseph Manning" <manning@...>]

On Wed, March 6, 2013 10:22, Muqtheear S wrote:

>> Hi I am new to Lua Scripting, Can some body say me "What Lua can do that
>> other programming languages can't do?".

Theoretically, Lua can of course do absolutely nothing that any other
Turing-complete language can do.  But beyond this theoretical result,
a key aspect of any language is its ease of use by human programmers.

In addition to the good features that other posters have mentioned,
for me a very attractive aspect of the actual Lua language is its
small size.

Having programmed in over 20 different languages, Lua is the first
language that I've used, in a long long time, where it seems feasible to
completely know every aspect of the language, deeply and thoroughly.
It's possible to hold all of Lua in your head.  The only other language
where I've felt that way was Pascal -- and Lua is vastly more flexible
than Pascal, while being roughly comparable in size.

Creating such a clean, powerful, and compact programming language
is a tremendous achievement, and great credit is due to the designers
for their remarkable insight and skills.

-- Joseph

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Joseph Manning / Computer Science / UCC Cork Ireland / manning@cs.ucc.ie
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