Re: Proposal: smartlua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Michal Kottman
<michal.kottman@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good news, everyone!

Another Futurama fan ;)

>         > require "moon"
>         Finding out available versions of moonscript...
>         Getting moonscript-0.2.2 (binary)...
>         Finding out available versions of lpeg...
>         Getting lpeg-0.10.2 (binary)...
>         Finding out available versions of alt-getopt...
>         Getting alt-getopt-0.7 (binary)...

Extremely cool, Michal. As you mention, the key thing is a database
mapping modules to packages. Always thought that it would e.g. be very
cool to say 'luarocks install lfs' but it turns out that this
information in general isn't possible to extract from the repo [1]  So
even starting that database is a very useful thing for everyone, e.g.
I don't doubt that a version of intellua could be written for
LuaRocks.

On a slight tangent, it comes up occaisonally, especially from former
Python users like Dirk, that it would be very useful to have
interactive help for modules. We don't have the docstring mechanism
and tend to rely on the kind developer actually putting useful
comments in front of functions, but it's a thing to think about when
considering what ultimately such a database should contain.

steve d.

[1] for pure Lua modules, the manifest has this information. But for
binary modules, there's no way to know except by taking apart all
sorts of makefiles. Makefiles were not meant to be analyzed by
programs, let alone humans ;)