On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 03:03:01PM +0100, Jonathan Fine wrote:
the reasons for choosing lua are (1) we like it, (2) it's small and stable, (3) it does not add updating, huge libraries and depencies mess to tex distributions, (4) it's fast, (5) it's made for this purpose
Ah, you may have misunderstood me. Perhaps I was not clear enough. My question is not why did you choose Lua, but why did you choose to embed rather than to extend.
I, personally, don't see the point of such question; it is clear that LuaTeX team, to whom I've no affiliation, are trying to extend and improve TeX and for some reasons they found extending it with a scripting language is nice idea and went with it. I fail to understand why they would be extending Lua by a typesetting engine when they are actually interested in the engine not Lua. Sure having TeX as a service is a neat idea and would make TeX available to many uses that is hard to be done now, but I can clearly see that this never have been one of the stated goals of LuaTeX. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer