Re: Re: Scripting Systems

> I don't see what's so wrong with Lua's documentation. It has all
> the info about the language, up to the next step - how to actually
> use it. 

Well, write -- learning anything strictly from a reference manual 
isn't exactly the best way to go about it.  Sure, everything you need 
is there, but what could take 5 minutes with proper documentation 
instead takes several hours through trial and error as you try to sort 
out what they meant in one sentence.

> And I must admit, there are plenty of ways one can use Lua
> (just as with C++). 

Okay, comparing Lua to C++ isn't doing it any favors =)

> I suppose the recently published book by
> Roberto Ierusalimschy (one of the creators of the language) talks
> about that.

It's quite a good book, it's just bothersome that it took until 
version 5 for the book to arrive. 

>> o.foo( y, x, z ) -- oops!
>>
>
> If x and y are of the same type, you wouldn't be able to catch this
> in any language.

Sure, but if they AREN'T of the same type, you would =)

> Syntactic errors are easily found by using loadstring/loadfile (I'm
> talking about Lua 5.0).

Actually doing a preprocess with luac will find the blatant syntax 
errors, so forcing that as a preprocess then loading strictly the .out 
files would work as well.

> I don't know any other scripting language that has these problems
> solved, I guess only the language you write yourself can solve
> them... And of the 3rd party languages Lua does the most things
> right.

Note that I wasn't trying to say that Lua was somehow "bad" -- I still 
like the language.  I was mostly trying to see how others have solved 
these issues that are rarely talked about.

Everyone knows about the advantages of scripting languages and how to 
load them and how to embed them and all sorts of issues with using 
them in terms of usability and performance, but I'm surprised at the 
fairly sparse information or discussion on the pragmatic problems with 
a dynamically typed scripting language.

> You should ask questions like these on the Lua mailing list, I
> think the people there are generally very helpful. 

They are, but this wasn't really meant to be a "how do I fix this in 
Lua" type question, but more of a "do all dynamically typed scripting 
languages suffer from similar problems?" question.

Brian




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