[ANN] Golly 2.8b3 -- now with Lua support

[Andrew Trevorrow <andrew@...>]

Golly is a free, open source application for exploring Conway's
Game of Life and many other types of cellular automata.
Golly has been scriptable with Python and Perl, but we recently
decided to drop Perl and add support for Lua.

Beta versions of Golly 2.8 are available for testing:

http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.8b3-win-32bit.zip     -- for Windows XP+ (32-bit)
http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.8b3-win-64bit.zip     -- for Windows 7+ (64-bit)
http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.8b3-gtk-32bit.tar.gz  -- for Linux (32-bit)
http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.8b3-gtk-64bit.tar.gz  -- for Linux (64-bit)
http://www.trevorrow.com/golly/golly-2.8b3-mac.zip           -- for Mac OS 10.6+

Here are some of the Lua scripts we've included:

flood-fill.lua  -- fills a clicked region with the current drawing state
giffer.lua      -- creates an animated GIF from the current selection
goto.lua        -- goes to a given generation
heisenburp.lua  -- illustrates the use of cloned layers
make-torus.lua  -- makes a toroidal universe from the current selection
metafier.lua    -- converts the current selection into a meta pattern
move-object.lua -- lets you move a connected group of live cells
oscar.lua       -- detects oscillating patterns, including spaceships
pop-plot.lua    -- displays a plot of population versus time
slide-show.lua  -- displays all patterns in the Patterns folder

See Help > Lua Scripting for more details.

Feedback from experienced Lua programmers would be most welcome.

Andrew Trevorrow (on behalf of the Golly Gang)