Dear list,
I have been using Lua for some months and really enjoying the experience so far.
I did a small hack for "parameterized modules" this week and I wanted to show it to you and ask for some feedback, particularly about whether there is a simpler way to achieve the same thing.
I am writing network card device drivers in Lua. I always start by writing the code as if there is only one network card to control, and then I need to generalize it to support controlling several network cards in the same Lua VM. I have been looking for simple and concise ways to achieve this generalization.
The first thing I tried was to wrap my driver module in a function:
function new(name_of_device) {
local x, y, z -- device-speific state
... module definition ...
}
but it seems like a lot of impact on the source code. (Perhaps this is mostly because of the way lua-mode is indenting the code in Emacs, i.e. forcing the body of the module three spaces to the right.)
Then I tried using o:m() style object-orientation instead, but I found it quite verbose to add so many "self" tokens to the source file.
Finally I have tried something more radical: to load a new copy of the module for every device instance so that I can continue to write each driver as if there is only one device to control.
What do you think?
(Please excuse the use of module() which I understand I should consider changing.)
