Re: Tcl vs. Lua

Cameron Laird wrote:
>Tcl supports Unicode and regular expressions more fully
>than Lua.

Indeed, strictly speaking Lua doesn't have regular expressions at all.
It has pattern matching with some wildcards and character classes but
it lacks both alternation (e.g. cat|dog) and closure of subexpressions
(e.g. (ab)*).

Some things can be made to work in UTF-8 since Lua is 8-bit clean but
the short answer regarding Unicode support is that it doesn't. There is
a library that provides alternative string functions that work with
UTF-8. If you need to do a wee bit of Unicode you can probably make it
work but Lua is not designed to make Unicode easy. For details see:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode.
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:09:37 2006