Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Seems nice. I don't agree with all of it's deviations from Lua, which unfortunately breaks portability, but I get it.

I wish C was scriptable, versus Lua being compliable, but this is really cool.

Well, you can still use Lua 5.4 from inside Nelua since it's integrated as part of the backend mechanism for the metaprogramming and not only, therefore I don't think it breaks portability...unless I did not fully understand you correctly.

Can you please clarify a bit more your concern about it?

It seems like global is a requirement for newindexing on _G (or if _G is even a thing in Nelua) from the documentation unless I'm reading it incorrectly.

You are correct, but this is an enhancement to have better compile time type checking and runtime efficiency. In the future _G table with similar Lua semantics is considered to be implemented to have better compatibility with Lua code. But using the "global" keyword will always be recommended, this way the compiler can do better type checking and generate more efficient code.

Yep. Totally get that.

Well, for starters, the arrays are 0-based, so ...

Arrays are 0 based, when tables are implemented they will be indexed from 1. I believe one of Nelua's design goals is that unaltered Lua code will be valid Nelua code.

>Arrays are 0 based, when tables are implemented they will be indexed from 1

Really?? I can see all the "off by one" bugs already! I wonder if a tool to convert Lua to Nelua wouldn't be a better idea than making the language incoherent.

Or maybe always make the programmer select the offset like Ada does.

> I wish C was scriptable

C kinda can be used as scripting language with MIR project https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir

It released version 0.1 just a few days ago, and I've successfully used it as an alternative and fast C compiler with Nelua.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com