Re: mathlib

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Coroutines once stated:
> On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 2:35 AM, Kevin Martin <kev82@khn.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> >
> > On 5 Apr 2014, at 11:32, Michael Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > In this model there would be a Lua language kernel.  It would be the Lua
> > language (obviously) and the *absolute minimum* set of features necessary
> > for implementation of that language.  *Everything* else (including much
> > of the functionality on strings, lists, math, debug, etc.) would be farmed
> > out to third-party (even if "blessed" third-party) libraries.
> >
> >
> > Although I'm not particularly fussed about whether these functions stay or
> > not, I would definitely support their movement into lmathx as a step
> > towards this Lua Kernel approach detailed above.
> >
> > I believe (maybe wrongly?) that people who use Lua for application
> > development, almost always have to use some libraries not distributed in
> > stock Lua, as the included functionality is limited. If people are happy to
> > include external libraries, then why not an external, greater capability
> > math library?
> >
> > Is the real question not
> >
> > "How many people who only use Stock Lua, or can't use lmathx, require
> > these functions?"
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Kevin
> >
> 
> It's kind of been suggested before -- but I would love this if the only
> "standard library" compiled into Lua were bindings for the C API.  That
> way, the rest of the core libs from the table to string libraries could be
> rewritten in just Lua and require()'d in if you wanted.  Lua's most core
> functionality (imo) is:
> 
> 1) lexing and compiling Lua source to bytecode
> 2) interpreting Lua bytecode (the VM)
> 3) embedding itself in other applications (the C API)

  Easy enough to play around with.  You just need the following files (list
from 5.1---probably similar to 5.2 and 5.3):

	lauxlib.c
	lapi.c
	lstate.c
	ldebug.c
	lobject.c
	ldo.c
	lgc.c
	ltm.c
	lvm.c
	ltable.c
	lstring.c
	lzio.c
	lfunc.c
	lmem.c
	lopcodes.c
	ldump.c
	lundump.c
	llex.c
	lparser.c
	lcode.c

  That fulfills all three options you listed (modulo require).  To get
"require" you will also need loadlib.c.  The rest are not required to run
the actual Lua VM.

> I think it'd be much cleaner and easier for people to help improve the
> standard libs from obvious mistakes if they were written in Lua, with an
> arguably negligible performance hit..  Indexing strings could be
> nightmarish if one wanted to implement the string library in Lua, though..
>  Anyway, people have been talking about removing some of the math
> functions, and I rarely see people use things like string.reverse() -- I
> vote take it a step further and make it so "require
> 'table/string/debug/etc..'" becomes the norm.

  So, go ahead and have fun 8-)

  -spc (But there's no print ... )