Re: GDB and scripting languages - which

Robert Dewar
2007-02-12T21:42:24Z

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.