Lua [L1 ] is one of the many languages with a Tk binding. A vaguely C-styled OO scripting language developed "half-open source" at a Brazilian institution, characterized by using hash tables as central data structure, even for vectors and lists. Lua's kernel is unusually compact. Lua style emphasizes metaprogramming.
Roberto published the Lua book [L2 ] early in 2004.
Lux [L3 ] is Jean-Claude Wippler's experiment at binding Lua together with more traditional scripting languages ...
Max Ischenko reports success using SWIG to wrap Lua libraries as loadable .so-s exposed through Tcl. He even has an incr Tcl class he calls "LuaInterpreter".
mfi: Yup, that was pretty simple. To compile a .so you just do:
swig -tcl8 -module lua Lua.i gcc -c -fpic lua_wrap.c gcc -shared lua_wrap.o -o lua.so -llua -llualib
And the abovementioned itcl class is a little more complex than this sketch:
itcl::class LuaInterpreter {
public {
method doFile fname { return [lua_dofile $L $fname] }
method doString buf { return [lua_dostring $L $buf] }
method call {func {arg ""}} {}
method popLast {} {
set value [lua_tostring $L -1]
lua_remove $L -1
return $value
}
method printStack {} {}
}
constructor {} {}
destructor { lua_close $L }
common call_template "return %s(%s);"
}
itcl::body LuaInterpreter::constructor {} {
set L [lua_open 1024]
L doString "function _ERRORMESSAGE(msg) print(msg) end"
}
itcl::body LuaInterpreter::call {func {arg ""}} {
set op [format $call_template $func $arg]
doString $op
}I found the interface of doString, call and popLast quite sufficient for my needs. Notice also, that you can have as many instances of Lua interpreter as you want. --mfi.
Lua is quite fast: http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ but doesn't seem to have all the nifty features that other languages do.
CL sometimes collects Lua references [L4 ].