Why Lua?

Post by bch » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 3:27 AM UTC

groovy2shoes wrote: post #82

bch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to what most people expect from lambdas; I force myself use Tcl's [apply] occasionally just to try slightly different paradigms, so I appreciate your commentary. One thing to note though, your final [inc 1] has nothing to do w/ $inc. In the interactive REPL (which I'm assuming you used), Tcl will (by default) essentially autocomplete commands if it can, and [inc] completed to [incr], which is "increment…

I didn't know that tclsh autocompletes commands; that's pretty neat. In this case, it looks like [incr 1] is incrementing a variable called 1, and appears to start from zero if the variable isn't initialized. I find Tcl's command model interesting because it leads to a very tiny semantics. A few years ago I spent a lot of time thinking about how it could be extended to have lambdas, and I couldn't come up with a way…

Post by cmf028 » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 3:41 AM UTC

sshumaker wrote: post #53

whatajoke wrote: post #49

Not criicizing lua, but worth comparing to guile. > Integration with C (and C++ for that matter) Guile does it better. You can use shared memory threads in guile without any penalty. Atmost you have to allow for the garbage collector to run when inside FFI functions. But that is a small price to pay in case you need to use multiple parallel-concurrent threads with a single heap. Guile was built with FFI in mind and h…

Not sure if I'd agree that Guile's FFI bindings are better than LuaJIT's FFI. It's certainly easier to declare a function in LuaJIT - you can take the definition directly from the header file, rather than transcoding it into s-exps. Compare: (define memcpy (let ((this (dynamic-link))) (pointer->procedure '* (dynamic-func "memcpy" this) (list '* '* size_t)))) vs. ffi.cdef [[ void * memcpy ( void * destination, const v…

Post by sixcorners » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 3:54 AM UTC

alanfalcon wrote: post #2

I took some Visual Basic programming courses in high school, some PASCAL courses in college, and then didn't program anything other than basic HTML/CSS for the next eight years. Last year I programmed an iPhone game in Lua (using the Corona SDK) and it was easy as Tau. Sure a better programmer would have finished the programming aspects in a quarter the time it took me, but I started by looking at Objective-C and I'm…

Post by bch » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 4:01 AM UTC

groovy2shoes wrote: post #89

bch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya -- interactive tclsh has a few creature-features. The autocomplete we're discussing, automatic fall-through to exec as if via sh(1), command history, history editing, and perhaps more I'm forgetting. kamloops$ tclsh8.6 % info commands up* update uplevel upvar % uptime 7:17PM up 1 hr, 7 users, load averages: 0.06, 0.12, 0.17 % ls fu ls: fu: No such file or directory child process exited abnormally % ls -ld fu ls: f…

> automatic fall-through to exec as if via sh(1) That explains why X11.app launched that one time I forgot a `$` before my `x`...

  kamloops$ cat ls.tcl
  #!/usr/pkg/bin/tclsh8.6

  ls foo

  kamloops$ ./ls.tcl 
  invalid command name "ls"
      while executing
  "ls foo"
      (file "./ls.tcl" line 3)
  kamloops$ tclsh8.6
  % source ls.tcl
  invalid command name "ls"
  % ls foo
  foo
  % 

Post by gtani » Wed, Feb 01, 2012, 4:05 AM UTC

whatajoke wrote: post #49

Not criicizing lua, but worth comparing to guile. > Integration with C (and C++ for that matter) Guile does it better. You can use shared memory threads in guile without any penalty. Atmost you have to allow for the garbage collector to run when inside FFI functions. But that is a small price to pay in case you need to use multiple parallel-concurrent threads with a single heap. Guile was built with FFI in mind and h…