On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 06:53:38PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
Hi,
Recently i've started looking into Lua, a language meant for embedding in programs. It has a small footprint, and by reading themanukl i get the impression that it's a pretty well designed and clever language. So (after playing with lua and scite, which has it embedded) i started wondering about including lua in pdftex. Of course i'm dependent on others but i'm curious abotu wat members of this list think of it. It has quite a clever function model. Especially because it has a small footprint (some 100-150 k) it would add a lot to pdftex but at little cost.
think of on the one hand:
\dimen0=\lua{tex.todimen(tex.thedimen(0)+tex.thedimen(2)}
kind of things, or
\setbox2=\hbox to \lua{tex.todimen(somevar)} {\lua{tex.text("abcde")}}
and alike. Of course the interface is to be determined, but a startingpoint can be access to box dimensions and registers and the ability to pipe text (strings) back into teh tex inpt stream.
whatdoyouthink ...
sounds interesting. I did a quick search on google to learn more on this, and I like more the idea. Lua seems to be quite suitable for this purpose: small, fast, simple syntax. Having it embedded certainly makes a lot of fun. Who will give it a try? :) Thanh