Re: Lua as a scripting language in NetBSD

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:53:57 -0400
    From:        matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>
    Message-ID:  
<b0459d5c0910171553r1ee6e413tf6faa525a5936ca0%mail.gmail.com@localhost>

  | As this discussion shows, the only real answer ...

That depends upon what the question is, and if that is to "make everyone
happy", you'd be right, but I certainly hope that is not the question.

Finding one good ("best" is subjective, we shouldn't be seeking that)
scripting language to include in base seems like it might have advantages,
at the minute it seems the candidates might be lua and tcl - I might have
presumed ruby as another possibility, but I don't know enough about it and
Adam claimed it isn't suitable.

Perl was never really planned as an embedded (or embeddable) langiage,
and while it started out as a reasonable scripting language, it got
grabbed by people who believe that one language should be suitable for
everything, and the answer to any question "how do I ..?" related to
perl got answered by "we'll just add ...", and the thing became a dinosaur.
Python was never rational.

One thing that suggests lua to me (and I've never looked at it) as a
possibility is ...

jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost said:
  | I think that it has yet to prove its usefulness as an all-purpose language.

which to me is an enormous compliment - "all-purpose" is exactly what is
not needed, the very idea that one programming language should be suitable
for everything is absurd - that's exactly why adding an embeddable scripting
language to base might be a good thing to do, because C is (and I hope it
remains) not suitable for everything either.   And I don't mean to imply
by that that the union of C and a scripting language should be, or could be,
suitable for everything either, there's room for lots more for other purposes
(but pkgsrc is suitable for most of those.)

kre