Re: Question on get/setmetatable()

[Francisco Olarte <folarte@...>]

Philippe:

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 10:03 PM Philippe Verdy <verdyp@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the relation between "formatting problems" and Lua, and why "avoiding Mediawiki" would solve such problems you experiment? (and where do you experiment them?)

Well, you ranted about how mw.whatever did bad formatting, I asked why
didn't you use a formatter, you told you had, so I assume your
problems where solved and your writings about mw being bad were
rhetorical.

I do not experiment any problem with it, I do not use it. It just
surprised me you used a bad formatter instead of writing one, which
you confirmed you had.

I'm not using MediaWiki, and after you kindly pointed to me it is a
thing which has a mw which does not format right, I am not going to
use it, so I will avoid future formatting problems. Thanks!

> You wondered what was "mw" I just talk about it thinking it was obvious from the message I posted that already cited it.

No, I didn't mean that. It was not obvious to me, but I've been found
to be a bit obtuse and my english reading skills are severly lacking.
But your pointer has been useful anyway.

> Beside Mediawiki (which the the most important deployment of Lua in the world and used by the most important community of Lua programmers, after game developers and few techies working on small devices) are there really other major uses of Lua elsewhere?

As I said, not a too good reader. Is this rethorical, or is that
MediaWiki the .. 3rd? most important community? I do not known, its
not a very important community to me. In fact I think this ML is the
only "community" I participate in.

> What caused Lua to become welknown worldwide instead of being confined to a Brasilian university where it started?

Is it really that well known? Was it already that confined? I'm not
too sure, but it is obvious we move in mainly different circles.

>  It's Mediwiki that popularized the Lua language for many by offering a major exposition to it. It has its local limitations (because of the Scribunto sandboxing, you can't use it to bind it with other languages or C modules, so yes it does not expose the LuaC API, only the Lua language itself and its standard library, with very few limitations for system calls and I/O). This is pure Lua. There's no I/O but support for a console, and returning text that can be displayed in a page, plus support for performing database queries, including updates, to Wikidata. It cannot be used to send mails or pilot some hardware device, the interaction is with a wiki website (not random external sites) in a controled environement that respect privacy rules of its community and operated under all other community rules.

That Mediawiki thing seems really complex. And I do not use lua
because its popular, but because it is simple.

....
> You may want to ignore it, but you cannot ignore it exists given its presence on the web in many sites and medias.

May be, but I've managed to ignore it from before the internet dark
ages before the web existed, I maight be able to ignore it for some
decades more before it fades away. I'm very good at ignoring things.

Francisco Olarte.