Hello,
yesterday I experimented a little with \directlua, and I decided to code a sorting routine, since sorting in TeX (as i.e. implemented in the experimental LaTeX 3 code or in Bernd Raichle's paper "Sorting in TeX's mouth") is quite slow.
Yes, excellent example and nicely emphasizing my comment during Taco's talk in San Diego: "Doing [list processing] in TeX is great for your ego,
I concur. It is a great feeling when you finally found an elegant (well, relatively elegant, we're talking about TeX's macro language) way of implementing a macro. BTW: Is there a transcript of the video available? The video itself is a little bit too large for me (and possibly others) to download. Also, I find it easier to read a text than to listen to a talk. Faster, too.
but..."
No buts! ;-)
In any case: Imagine the possibilities when using Lua not only for manipulating the node list, but also for parsing user input!
Using lua to parse user input is convenient, think of key=val processing which is currently jumping through hoops to remove spaces and the correct number of braces etc.
Yes, but until LuaTeX is out of beta and widespread, it will be necessary to keep an implementation in TeX. So unless it really speeds things up, or makes better error handling possible, I do not see much use in parsing user input in Lua. Or am I forgetting something? Jonathan