heys guys, why precisely was Lua chosen as the implementation language?/ ANT (ant is not TeX)/, see http://ant.berlios.de/ was registered: 2005-Nov-23 10:38. as far as i'm aware, dynamic languages are generally much slower than those that are statically typed. and i'm not trolling, i just want to know why. please share your thoughts. mohamed
2008/12/26 Mohamed Bana
why precisely was Lua chosen as the implementation language?/ ANT (ant is
Lua is not the implementation language of luaTeX; check your facts. luaTeX started as pdfTeX + lua; ant is a typesetting engine written in OCaml, which is a completely different approach.
far as i'm aware, dynamic languages are generally much slower than those that are statically typed.
FUD. :-)
and i'm not trolling, i just want to know why. please share your thoughts.
Please check your facts. Best Martin
Mohamed Bana wrote:
heys guys,
why precisely was Lua chosen as the implementation language?/ ANT (ant
it's an extension language but indeed one can write extensions to tex in it
is not TeX)/, see http://ant.berlios.de/ was registered: 2005-Nov-23
i must admit that i never looked into ant
10:38. as far as i'm aware, dynamic languages are generally much slower than those that are statically typed.
so what ... at least users can extend now without the need to recompile
and i'm not trolling, i just want to know why. please share your thoughts.
short answer: because like lua and because it's meant as as embedable language we have been publishing for several years about luatex so there should be googleable resources (tug, ntg, dante, gust, conference proceedings, luatex mail archive, context list mail archive, etc) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
Hans Hagen writes:
Mohamed Bana wrote:
and i'm not trolling, i just want to know why. please share your thoughts.
[...] it's meant as as embedable language
Hans, you missed the most important point: Though Lua is a very modern and extremely powerful programming language with very interesting concepts, the main advantage is that it's easy to learn. Whether Lua is designed for embedded systems or not is quite unimportant to end-users. Otherwise you could consider GNU guile, a Scheme engine, too. Nothing against Scheme (or OCaml, Lisp, Perl, INTERCAL, Whitespace...), but for casual TeX users there is nothing better than Lua. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
Hans Hagen writes:
Mohamed Bana wrote:
and i'm not trolling, i just want to know why. please share your thoughts.
[...] it's meant as as embedable language
Hans, you missed the most important point: Though Lua is a very modern and extremely powerful programming language with very interesting concepts, the main advantage is that it's easy to learn.
Whether Lua is designed for embedded systems or not is quite unimportant to end-users. Otherwise you could consider GNU guile, a Scheme engine, too.
ah, i didn't mean for 'embedded systems', but as a language to embed i.e. use as interface to something bigger; 'extension language' is a better term
Nothing against Scheme (or OCaml, Lisp, Perl, INTERCAL, Whitespace...), but for casual TeX users there is nothing better than Lua.
sure, and there ar emore reasons, like 'not being bloated by large libraries', rather stable, interesting small, easy to master the whole language, etc Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
Mohamed Bana
why precisely was Lua chosen as the implementation language?/ ANT (ant is not TeX)/, see http://ant.berlios.de/ was registered: 2005-Nov-23 10:38. as far as i'm aware, dynamic languages are generally much slower than those that are statically typed.
Ant may be written in OCaml but the author himself pointed out recently that ant wasn't written for speed and isn't fast. It's designed, like luaTeX, to be easy to modify and extend (as long as you know OCaml and can recompile). It did include a scripting language before luaTeX :) but not a full-featured one.
participants (5)
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Barry Schwartz -
Hans Hagen -
Martin Schröder -
Mohamed Bana -
Reinhard Kotucha