Re: Re Atari BASIC versis Python versus Lua in 1982...

[Martin <eden_martin_fuhrspam@...>]

On 03/17/2017 01:19 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
>> Lua is missing simple but
>> powerful string manipulation functions as the Basic has.
> 
>   What?  All I recall of BASIC string manipulations are LEFT$(), RIGHT$(),
> MID$() and STRING$(), all of which can be replaced with string.sub() in Lua. 
> I recall those being pretty typical of the time.

There are more.

LEFT$/RIGHT$/MID$ - get part of string
  ~ string.sub
MID$ - set part of string
  ~ string.gsub
LEN
  ~ string.len, # operator
LTRIM$/RTRIM$ - trim spaces
  ~ string.gsub
LCASE$/UCASE$
  ~ string.(lower/upper)
INSTR - find substring
  ~ string.find
STR$/VAL/HEX$/OCT$
  ~ tonumber/tostring
ASC/CHR$
  ~ string.(char/byte)
STRING$/SPACE$ - repeat one char <n> times,
  ~ string.rep
MKI$/CVI/... - codecs to internal number formats (int, dbl, float, ...)
  ~ string.(pack/unpack)

Generally I feel Lua functions more generic, more powerful and
harder to master.

Surely they are completely different languages. Lua is a more
language itself, with central abstractions on tables, first-type
functions and variable code. While QBASIC is a fixed interface to
hardware that was available at that time. Lua is good for processing
complex data structures while QBASIC is good for implementing UI.

(BTW for Lua is a nice library Love2D which affords similar
functionality as QBASIC - almost direct access to hardware without
predefined UI elements.)

(And I think that niche for data processing are still almost empty.
Only regexps are there. (And probably map/reduce.))

(Yes, we can do anything with C/Go/Pascal/Ada/.. but sometimes
marginal simplicity and narrower application field are needed to
implement complex things.)

-- Martin