From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 18851 invoked by alias); 12 Feb 2007 21:42:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 18838 invoked by uid 22791); 12 Feb 2007 21:42:22 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from nile.gnat.com (HELO nile.gnat.com) (205.232.38.5) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:42:13 +0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by filtered-nile.gnat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 130EB48CBC4; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:42:11 -0500 (EST) Received: from nile.gnat.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (nile.gnat.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 27278-01; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:42:10 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (nile.gnat.com [205.232.38.5]) by nile.gnat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B67F248CBC2; Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:42:10 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <45D0DF34.2090405@adacore.com> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:59:00 -0000 From: Robert Dewar User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Eli Zaretskii CC: Jim Blandy , gdb@sourceware.org Subject: Re: GDB and scripting languages - which References: <20070108222005.GA27451@nevyn.them.org> <20070210203307.GA27502@nevyn.them.org> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2007-02/txt/msg00090.txt.bz2 Eli Zaretskii wrote: > Anyway, two advantages of Lua are: > > . It was designed from ground up to be primarily an extension > language, not a general-purpose language that just happens to have > C bindings for its interpreter; therefore it is small and > efficient (by a large factor compared to Tcl, for example). > > . It's typeless and generally lacks the clutter that more > ``complete'' programming languages require: type declarations, > memory allocations, initialization before use, etc. To me, the fundamental requirement for a language to be used for writing gdb scripts (I refuse to use the bogus term scripting language :-)) is that it be widely used and widely familiar as well as being a decently designed language. To me Python meets these criteria, Lua does not. Mere technical arguments are not enough for a choice in a case like this.