Re: <close> and os.exit()

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 30/05/2020 17:56, Andrea wrote:
> Lorenzo,
>
> I recognize myself in what you write in your 'rant'. I am a
> relatively experienced C programmer and I think this is one of the
> reasons why was able to like Lua so much. If I were not a C
> programmer... who knows? For sure, the quick start was not so quick:
> I downloaded so many different Lua installations (uLua, LuaPower, Lua
> from lua.org, LuaForWindows, LuaJIT, ... I compiled my own).

I just "dabble" in C (I had much more experience in C++ and still more
in Java, but that was aeons ago, when I was a professional developer).

In the last couple of years I had to revamp my C knowledge because, as a
teacher in a technical high school, I've started teaching embedded
programming, and no, I don't want students to keep learning embedded by
patching things together using Arduino libraries and IDE. They are great
for toying around, but they don't help learning how professionals in the
fields work, and they hide all the hardware management that a
professional dev has to know about!

My goal, somewhat far fetched now, is teaching them programming an
Arduino board directly in C. But enough digressing!

> I also think Lua should be more widespread and I find myself pushing
> for Lua adoption while I am told to use Python (and microPython) - It
> seems that someone here has had the same experience (at CERN Lua is
> limited to MAD). Where I see JavaScript I would like to see Lua.
> Where I see Python I would like to see Lua.

In my school I tried two years in a row to push a course about Lua, and
its acceptance was quite frigid, alas.

Last year a young colleague pushed for a course in Python and it was
happily welcomed by lots of people.


> What can I do to help?
>
> For example: I have seen a discussion on the "dry" manual
>
> Could we start a cooperation to write a less "dry" yet official
> manual?

As long as official goes without the blessing of Lua team, I think
someone on this list has already tried to do that some years ago, but I
may be mistaken.

As far as unofficial docs are concerned, Steve Donovan (a long time list
member and contributor) did a nice "Annotated Lua Source" site here:

http://stevedonovan.github.io/lua-5.1.4/

But I don't think he, or anyone else, has done something similar for
later versions.

Steve has been absent from the list for a long time now (Hi Steve! If
you're reading this, I hope everything is OK!).


> As an example, I would love a manual who justify why things are as
> they are (a lot of questions I have asked here had to do something
> about the reason, the advantage, etc - and I know that lua-wiki and
> lua-l have some answer but one has to dig deep, which I did by the
> way!).

That's would be very useful, since many questions here revolve around 
why some design decisions were made.

The bad thing about Lua ecosystem is that it is quite fragmented and 
many efforts to do collective work has gone stale. People tend to start 
working on things together, then the effort dies off quite fast. 
Sometimes something good is produced, but it ends up unmaintained.


> Andrea
>
> Too much for a "pure" Lua programmer, IMO.
> >
> :
>
> > I really think Lua should be more widespread, and a good ref man
> > that
>
> :
>
> > Usually lua-l friendliness compensated for that, but you must be
> > willing
> :
>
> > And mind you, I hear ever more people wanting to embed Python
> > nowadays!
>
> Andrea

Ciao!

-- Lorenzo