Re: Tcl vs. Lua

Lisa Pearlson wrote:
> Thank you.. This was very helpful.. it tells me I shouldn't bother with Lua,
> .. or do I?

I wouldn't say that since knowledge is often its own benefit. I took a
peek and found Lua's concept of "tables" particularly interesting. It's
like Tcl's list+array as well as C/C++ struct. Structs is the one thing
I miss in Tcl.

> They say it's used a lot for "Games programming".

So is Tcl, for exactly the same reason. Though Lua have slowly been
replacing Tcl. I suspect it's because it's smaller, uses infix notation
and doesn't use $ to handle variables (making C programmers more
comfortable with it).

> Doesn't cross platform usually means it can't take advantage of hardware specifics?

No, it only means it is clean C (or ANSI C, or POSIX) code without
platform dependencies. Taking advantage of hardware specifics is the
job of your C compiler.

> The way I heard about Lua was when I was looking for a "Setup Wizard" type
> program to create installers for my own software, like Install Shield, Wise,
> etc. I came across one that featured embedded "Lua scripting" to do install
> operations.
> But wouldn't TCL be much more suitable for this? I sure thing so.
>

I'd think Tcl would be perfect for this since this sort of stuff
involves a lot of text processing.

> It seems Lua's strengths is smaller footprint and better performance than
> TCL. And they said it runs on mobile devices too. TCL is too slow for mobile
> devices, I was told on here.
>

Tcl runs fine on mobile devices - better than Java IMHO since Tcl uses
less RAM. The Tcl interpreter is usually the first interpreter to be
ported on small platforms. But since Lua is so small, I suspect it uses
even less resource than Tcl. But saying Tcl is slow for mobile devices
is just plain wrong since the same mobile devices are usually designed
to run Java.
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:09:41 2006