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

[Andrew Starks <andrew@...>]

I miss Steve. :)

- Andrew Starks

> On Nov 24, 2021, at 10:22, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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!