Re: OR, quantifier support in Lua patterns

[Paul Merrell <marbux@...>]

Jim said:

> we thougt it could be used as a scripting language, akin to perl, python, ruby
and all the others.

> we failed to recognize that it was only designed for authors that use it as
a config language for their c program to avoid inventing one of their own.
Lua is obviously not designed to run scripts that do any real work.
it's just a toy, a study of how a config language could look, it's not made
for scripting like say perl or other scripting languages,
it simply was not made for this and thus obviously is not up for the task.
we thought having an interpreter around was for interpreting scripts as the
perl interpreter for instance does.

Gee, I must have dreamed that I wrote hundreds of extending scripts in
Lua for the NoteCase Pro outliner over the last several years and that
all these other developers embed Lua as a a scripting engine for their
users. <https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used>

:-)

> it's a really poor design that changes with every release because something
is broken again or poorly thought out.

NoteCase Pro has upgraded to the latest Lua version with each release
since v. 5.1. In all that time, I've only needed slight tweaks in
three scripts because of Lua changes. YMMV.

Best regards,

Paul