On 29/05/2015 23:49, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 4:33 AM, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes:
Looks to me as if Lua doesn't have integers at all
They fixed that in Lua 5.3:
http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/readme.html#changes
That's 64-bit integers, not arbitrary-precision, but that's something
at least. You do still need to worry about what happens when your
numbers get too big; in Python, you simply don't. So it's still not
quite there in terms of functionality.
But then the vast majority of integer operations won't require arbitrary
precision. (Or maybe Python programmers routinely use big integers all
over the place simply because they can.)
Likewise, eight-bit strings, not Unicode.
Also fixed in 5.3 (basic utf-8 support added, per above).
Do you see what I mean about functionality being sacrificed for
security? There is no way that this could be called fully functional
by comparison with Python.
Python seems to have sacrificed some performance. When I questioned why
3.x was slower than 2.x, merging int and long int (as I understood it)
was one of the reasons put forward.
(Simplicity seems to work for Lua. The entire distribution (for LuaJIT
2.0), seems to be about 2MB, including C sources, and the JIT
interpreter is about 220KB. LuaJIT was also one of the fastest dynamic
languages I've tried. But you're right that the language is rather sparse.)
--
Bartc
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