On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Hans Hagen wrote:
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)}
or maybe \lua{tex.dimen(7) = tex.dimen(0)+tex.dimen(2)}
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 ...
looks interesting. Lua is part of debian sarge, have to play with it. Seems regexs are not POSIX. Something similar but with a larger footprint, > 750 kByte, you would get from another language familiar to you :-) Embedding a Ruby Interpreter In addition to extending Ruby by adding C code, you can also turn the problem around and embed Ruby itself within your application. Here's an example... Similar principle. rubypdftex, luapdftex,... Regards, Hartmut