Lua Book

[ciw42]

claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) wrote in message news:<1049gqe9n762hf6 at corp.supernews.com>...
> In article <mailman.28.1078240405.12614.python-list at python.org>,
> Pete Shinners  <pete at shinners.org> wrote:
> >Cameron Laird wrote:
> >> Incidentally, have you heard the news about Lua?  Look at
> >> <URL: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/book/ >.
> >
> >I have no experience with Lua, but some of the code examples from the book 
> >may frighten me away for good.
> >
> >http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/book/code/allwords.lua.html
> >
> >
> >
> >I suppose Python's recent introduction of generators makes this rather trivial.
> >
> >def allwords():
> >     for line in sys.stdin:
> >         for word in line.split():
> >             yield word
> >
> >for word in allwords():
> >     print word
> >
> >
> >
> 
> Provocative comparison; perhaps Roberto will even join in
> and comment here.  In any case, there's still a place for
> Lua, and I think there's value in the discussion of Lua
> that comp.lang.python has already hosted.

Ordered a copy of the Lua book as the language seemed quite
interesting and potentially useful. The full text was available on the
'net, but I like to read this sort of material whilst travelling.

Although it starts out describing quite a nicely structured language
(occasionally similar in concept to, but never as readable as Python)
as the book proceeds, the more in-depth examples become harder to read
(a lot more like Perl) and having finished the book I was left feeling
that the core language offered nothing useful over Python, in fact it
was rather lacking in many areas.

Don't get me wrong, I know if I had a good enough reason I could quite
quicky and reasonably happily start developing in Lua, but it's
unlikely to ever come close to Python for general purpose coding. That
said, it may well fit the bill for a new embedded low-spec PC-based
device we'll be starting development on in a few months time. The
Python runtime is just too big and this is one area where Lua wins
out, so we'll just have to wait and see.