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On 11/18/2014 09:50 AM, Dirk Laurie wrote:

2014-11-18 10:16 GMT+02:00 Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com>:


On Nov 17, 2014, at 10:29 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:

2014-11-18 6:11 GMT+02:00 Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com>:


Now, I know what is going on, and you know what is going on.
But does the average scripter know?

Does the average scripter know what is going on with
metamethods, coroutines, the call stack, upvalues etc?

Some things in Lua are hard merely because the
underlying computer science concept is hard.

And your point is?

That arguments based on how "the average scripter" or
"newbies" would react are not relevant for Lua. Maybe
for Basic or Logo, but not Lua.

Lua is a highly sophisticated all-purpose language, not
particularly convenient for scripting (e.g. os.execute and
io.popen need to be invoked explicitly, no syntactic sugar).
Lua 5.3 beta has moved strongly in the direction of greater
awareness of hardware features: just look at §6.4.2, which
speaks of alignment, endianness, size_t etc assuming that
the reader knows what is going on.


/*
** $Id: lua.h,v 1.319 2014/10/17 19:17:55 roberto Exp $
** Lua - A Scripting Language
** Lua.org, PUC-Rio, Brazil (http://www.lua.org)
** See Copyright Notice at the end of this file
*/

A scripting language that not particularly convenient for scripting?

I think there is no agreement here what 'scripting' means.
I am not really sure either, but I am sure, that accessing the OS is not a relevant criteria. ECMAScript is a good counter example for this kind of scripting language, 
as you can't access the OS directly at all.
--
Thomas