Re: Idea: Reference Libraries

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2014-04-22 13:57 GMT+02:00 Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com>:
>
> The most inportant part: it's just the current and future standard Lua
> libraries. Nothing beyond that. The fight couldn't be about "what is
> standard."
>
> If there would be any fighting, it would be about what must remain as core
> Lua and what could be pulled out into a separate library bundle, (although
> this too might already be defined).
>
> This separation would include what is now woven into the Lua Reference
> Guide. The separate "Reference Libraries" would have their own reference
> guide.[1]


I have often felt the need for a different split, but that would not be a split
into two parts, each with its own manual, but simply a different way of
organizing the manual.

The section dealing with the C API has a substantially different flavour from
the rest, since programming in C is so different from programming in Lua.
But it wedges in between the documentation of the language and that of
the library. When I am in C mode, it matters little, since everything is
contiguous. But when I am in Lua mode, I find myself frantically scrolling
over the API documentation until I remember that the back-arrow will return
me to the index from where it's one button.

So I would have liked two major divisions: the script language, including its
libraries, and the C API. But what the heck, I'm used to it.

That does raise the question: what the heck, aren't we used to the io,math
and os librariest too?
,