Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
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Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#2Full version of "Programming in Lua", available for free on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZV5hXZ8QPKIC
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#3I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year.
I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker.
Am I just missing some information in this regard?
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#4Full version of "Programming in Lua", available for free on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZV5hXZ8QPKIC
That book is a little dated because it deals with Lua 5.0 but is still good. The differences between 5.0 and 5.1 can be found here http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7 and new version of the book can be found on amazon.
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#5I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…
> Am I just missing some information in this regard?
A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support.
Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#6I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…
> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.
(I'm the guy in the video.)
I haven't had a need for Unicode in Lua, but when I stumbled across some information about it, the essential story was that there is nothing stopping you from writing code to manipulate Unicode data (obviously), but there is also nothing built in to help you. All the built in string stuff is ANSI/ASCII/whatever.
However, the language Io (which often gets mentioned in the same breath as Lua, though it's quite different in some ways) has a stronger Unicode story: http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Unicode
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#7I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…
> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.
The Lua philosophy is far different from the philosophy of other languages. That's why videos like these, that cover the advantages before the tradeoffs, are a good thing. Knowing the positive things about something really effects my perceptions of the tradeoffs.
Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language. Usually when I hear it I think the person must think it's a part of accepting those that speak other languages. I would point out the fact that Ruby took much longer to get Unicode support than Python as a counterpoint to that, as Ruby's creator, Matz, is Japanese.
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#8I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…
http://luaforge.net/projects/ul-str/
Last updated June 21st 2010. Readme seems to indicate it supports all the important stuff like compare, concatenate, encode, lowerupper, Regexp, url escaping.
Says beta and I haven't tried it yet tho : /
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#9I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…
> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.
More specifically, Unicode is one of those things (like bignum support) where Lua's design for embedding assumes that if it's a priority, your project will already have settled on a library for it, so anything Lua came bundled with would just get in the way. The GMP library, for example, is almost four times larger than the whole Lua runtime.
Besides, Lua strings are interned raw byte-arrays (like atoms in Erlang or Lisp atoms), and can have \0s and other arbitrary binary data. While the standard string library is ignorant of Unicode, there's nothing preventing extra libraries from providing Unicode-aware string operations.
Lua also left out native regular expression support, because it would be larger than the rest of the standard libraries put together. You can just load LPEG if it matters.
Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video
#10Full version of "Programming in Lua", available for free on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZV5hXZ8QPKIC
That book is a little dated because it deals with Lua 5.0 but is still good. The differences between 5.0 and 5.1 can be found here http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#7 and new version of the book can be found on amazon.
It will still give you a good taste of the language, but PiL 2nd ed. and the reference manual will be much more useful in the long run.