On 24/10/2014 10:40 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
Like landing at Thanet, having Lua usable under z/OS UNIX is "a good thing". It may make its way against REXX, or again it may not.
It goes without saying that us mainframers tend to stick to what we know. But I encourage as many people as possible to give Lua a try. It's a very elegant and powerful programming language which is a pleasure to use.
The matrix-algebra test case is not, however, an appropriate one for the comparative evaluation of these two implementations of Lua and REXX. It is not indeed a good test case for the evaluation of any scripting language. (The notion that either REXX or Lua is a general-purpose programming language reflects a very specialized point of view. It may be a splendid vehicle for what and all that one is personally interested in, but that is a very different matter.)
The intent was to compare speed. Lua beats all other scripting languages hands down on that front http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programs-are-fastest.php.
David Crayford deserves our thanks for making Lua available, and his enthusiasm is entirely understandable. Assuming that this implementation is used, as I hope it will be, we shall know better a year or so hence just how much better it is than the REXX implementation he deplores.
Thank you for the kind words. Just for the record I do not deplore REXX. I have used it for almost 25 years and I'm still amazed by it's elegance and simplicity. My issue is with the
implementation on z/OS, which is suboptimal.
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
