Re: [ANN] el - an interactive shell-friendly form of Lua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 2:11 PM Lorenzo Donati
<lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:
> The proof-of-concept I'm thinking of was something simpler and not meant
> to be a front-end for some mature library, just a toy project or
> something like that.

I once did a toy shell called luash, but I've come to believe that it
is *very* hard to replace the standard shell, which comes with lots of
cool things, plus *lots of muscle memory*.

So 'el' is something that is meant to fit right in with the rest of
the shell, like sed or AWK (though people do write AWK programs - I
don't have that ambition with 'el')

It is meant for people who remember the Lua standard library more than
the more obscure utilities, like 'cut' etc. For what we might call
'personal automation' :)  It is also a very expressive calculator - I
linked in lhf's lcomplex using luabuild, got a 230K all-in-one binary
calculator that speaks complex.

Also, exploring the language design space around notation that is
easier to type interactively than typical PLs (except Forth). And
pushing implicit behaviour as far as I can, which is what one does in
an experiment!