Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2026 from 2003/2/24
From: po-RNO
Quote:
asrael22 wrote:
Why actually Lua?
Isn't Arexx good enough? As a pretty much first time Arexx user the language actually feels kind of fresh and it is very much integrated into the OS.
Unfortunately it seems that ARexx is a dead end, no matter how nice it has been. There isn't native ARexx implementation and you need an old 3rd party 68k library to get it work fully. BTW. OS4 is in the same situation, even they don't have PPC native ARexx, because it's originally written in 68k assembly and it'd be a huge task to rewrite it from scratch. 68k library has worked for now, but it'll stop working with the ISA switch in the future, and of course it's not good that it isn't bundled and working out-of-the-box with the OS. There's been talks about native re-implementation for MorphOS since the day 1, but it certainly feels very unlikely to happen now after 15 years or so.
Lua on the other hand is a modern mainstream scripting language. It's also lightweight, which suits the MorphOS philosophy. What's great with the MorphOS implementation is that it can be used to replace ARexx scripts, because you can use the existing ARexx ports from Lua and all ARexx functions of all legacy and new programs are usable with Lua scripts. You can do pretty much everything what you'd do with ARexx, but with modern and native alternative. The great legacy standards which have been build with ARexx can be inherited with Lua, and I find it worth to support and move on with :)
