Hi, On 12/18/2010 01:50 AM, Philipp A. wrote:
like… which one? i only know of the tabs vs. spaces
The significant whitespace is why python would not have been an option for the core extension language in luatex even if it was twice as small and twice as fast as lua. Forced indentation simply does not work out well if data and program are intermixed in the same source file. Which is not saying that I don't like python, but (also taking account the other differences to lua) it is simply the wrong tool for the job.
my dream for luatex/context would be a built-in lua interpreter (because lua is so fucking small) and optional modules for other, heavier, scripting languages (perl, ruby), which you don’t have to install.
An extended version of luatex-lunatic (or some similar project) would potentially allow that. A lot of the lua functions that 'talk' to the internals are nothing more than wrappers for argument and return value grabbing, and it would be pretty easy to (re)code those bindings for any other scripting language. The remaining functions that are not trivially implemented are the ones that we need to work on before 1.0, because these are the exactly the areas where the TeX source is too messy to be easily interfaced, in any scripting language. Best wishes, Taco