thanks! i like lua a lot despite its flaws; that's what i wrote my own literate programming system in. lua's 'bytecode' is actually a wordcode (a compilation approach which i think wirth's euler paper was perhaps the first published example of) and quite similar in some ways to wirth's risc-1/2/3/4/5 hardware architecture family
i hope they do go to open access; these papers are too valuable to be lost to future acm management or bankruptcy
Are you familiar with the 'Leo' editor? It is the one that comes closest to what I consider to be a practically useful literate programming environment. If you haven't looked at it yet I'd love it if you could give it a spin and let me know what you make of it.
i read a little about it many years ago but have never tried it. right now, for all its flaws, jupyter is the closest approximation to the literate-programming ideal i've found
Yes, Jupyter is definitely a contender for the crown, it's a very powerful environment. I've made use of a couple of very impressive notebooks (mostly around the theme of automatic music transcription) and it always gets me how seamlessly the shift between documentation and code is. I wished the Arduino guys would do something like that it would be make their programming environment feel less intrusive and less 'IDE' like (which mostly just gets in the way with endless useless popups).
there are a lot of design decisions that are pretty debatable, but the ones that seem clearly wrong to me are:
- indexing from 1 instead of 0;
- the absence of a nilness/nonexistence distinction (so misspelling a variable or .property silently gives the wrong answer instead of an exception);
- variables being global by default, rather than local by default or requiring an explicit declaration;
- printing tables by default (with %q for example) as identities rather than contents. (you could argue that this is a simplicity thing; lua 5.2 is under 15000 lines of code, which is pretty small for such a full-featured language, barely bigger than original-awk at 6200 lines of c and yacc plus 1500 lines of awk, and smaller than mawk at 16000 lines of c, 1100 lines of yacc, and 700 lines of awk. but a recursive table print function with a depth limit is about 25 lines of code.)
none of these are fatal flaws, but with the benefit of experience they all seem like clear mistakes
It's been long time since I last used lua and only positive memories remained :) I used it for adding scripting in the apps I worked on and the experience was very good -- sandboxed from the start, decent performance.
Perhaps having 0-based indexes would've been bad for our users but I don't think they used arrays at all.
i hope they do go to open access; these papers are too valuable to be lost to future acm management or bankruptcy