Re: mathlib

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 13:05:26 +0200
> From: steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: mathlib

> But, it is very _convenient_ to have the Lua core implemented in C.
> Otherwise the build gets involved (first build luac, then compile Lua
> bits, use bin2lua, recompile....) and I do appreciate that the Lua
> build is such a straightforward makefile.  That feels like a good
> pragmatic argument.

The core, yes, but the libraries not so much. Mathlib could be 'math.lua'
shipped as a text file and 'require'ed as with any other Lua library.

But the idea *could* be taken further. The parser could be done in Lua and
shipped as an include file containing a 'C' array initialiser in the 
standard source package. Might be necessary to have different versions
of the include file for endian issues, but that is just a compiler switch.
So out-of-the-box you can build the runtime and use that to rebuild the
parser if you want to do that.

But that is much more ambitious that I intended to suggest for the moment.
Just migrating the libraries, incrementally, to Lua would be a good
evolutionary path and since we are discussing mathlib, that could be a
gentle toe in the water!