Passing a language through the eye of a needle

Abstract

How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design.

References

1. de Moura, A., Ierusalimschy, R. Revisiting coroutines. ACM Trans. Programming Languages and Systems 31, 2 (2009), 6.1--6.31.
2. DeLoura, M. The engine survey: general results. Gamasutra; http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkDeLoura/20090302/581/The_Engine_Survey_General_results.php.
3. Ierusalimschy, R. Programming in Lua, 2 ^nd Ed. Lua.org, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2006.
4. Ierusalimschy, R., de Figueiredo, L. H., Celes, W. Lua---An extensible extension language. Software: Practice and Experience 26, 6 (1996), 635--652.
5. Ierusalimschy, R., de Figueiredo, L. H., Celes, W. The implementation of Lua 5.0. Journal of Universal Computer Science 11, 7 (2005): 1159--1176.
6. Ierusalimschy, R., de Figueiredo, L. H., Celes, W. The evolution of Lua. In Proceedings of the 3 ^rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages (San Diego, CA, June 2007).
7. Ousterhout, J.K. Scripting: Higher-level programming for the 21st century. IEEE Computer 31, 3 (1998), 23--30.
8. Python Software Foundation. Extending and embedding the Python interpreter, Release 2.7 (Apr. 2011); http://docs.python.org/extending/.

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • History of computing

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language features

      • Language types