Re: [ANN] Luam: A minimalist, procedural Lua dialect for CAD (Luametry)

Hi Ben,

Lua without closures and metatables is like Lisp without parentheses.

Just a joke, I don't want to say anything bad about Your project :-) Good luck!

@Rett Berg
Thanks for the link to civboot.

Best regards,
-- Andrew

вт, 17 лют. 2026 р. о 20:07 Ben Sivan <[email protected]> пише:
>
> Hi Rett,
>
> Thanks for reaching out! The Civboot project sounds fascinating. A simpler 2D-to-extrude kernel is a very pragmatic approach for manufacturing, and I think you could do a lot with it.
>
> Regarding the implementation: I modified the Lua source code directly to introduce those breaking changes, like local-by-default and boolean strictness. Because of those fundamental shifts, I suspect a direct package.searchers integration wouldn't work seamlessly right now.
>
> While backward compatibility wasn't a primary goal for Luam, the delta isn't massive, so it would be pretty easy to translate the luametry logic back to standard Lua for importability. I’m definitely open to discussing how that could work.
>
> I’d love to dive deeper into this with you. Feel free to reach out at [email protected] and we can chat more!
>
> Best,
> Ben
>
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2026, 07:39 Rett Berg, <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> This is a really cool project. I have plans to try and build something similar for civboot.org - albeit with a simpler kernel (likely 2D only with extrude), which I think you could do quite a lot with in terms of manufacturing. I'd love to chat about it (off the list) if that is something which would interest you.
>>
>> Are you compiling luam to lua (either bytecode or syntax)? If you are (or could), you could consider implementing it as a library which adds itself to the package.searchers, documented under require. This would allow lua modules to import luam and vice-versa.
>>
>> Best,
>> Rett
>>
>> On Saturday, February 14, 2026 at 5:22:29 PM UTC-7 Ben Sivan wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Martin,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad the "Local by default" and "Boolean strictness" resonate with you.
>>>
>>> Regarding multiline comments, it is not a hill to die on. Removing them was mostly an exercise in seeing how far I could minimize the syntax. Since the lexer handles triple-quoted strings anyway, I can easily reconsider, if it becomes a nuisance.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Ben
>>>
>>> On Sat, 14 Feb 2026, 12:02 'Martin Eden' via lua-l, <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 2026-02-14 15:49, Ben Sivan wrote:
>>>> > Hello everyone,
>>>> >
>>>> > [...]
>>>> >
>>>> > As a long-time admirer of Lua’s minimalism, my goal with Luam was to
>>>> > further constrain the language for a specific domain. In many ways, Luam is
>>>> > a "subtractive" dialect; I found that by removing certain features and
>>>> > standardizing others, I could create a more predictable environment for 3D
>>>> > modeling.
>>>> Hello Ben, I think it's nice project
>>>>
>>>> Points where I agree (and don't use in my code anyway):
>>>>
>>>> * No metatables
>>>> * nil is not boolean
>>>> * Local by default
>>>>
>>>> I have no opinion about "enhanced REPL", don't use it much.
>>>>
>>>> But decision to remove multiline comments looks strange to me.
>>>>
>>>> If you allow multiline strings why forbid multiline comments?
>>>> They are actually fine, in last ten years I'm moving to block comments
>>>> describing what following block of code does.
>>>>
>>>> -- Martin
>>>>
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>>
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