New script engine?

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pjj
Posts: 2109
Joined: 13 Oct 2009 13:48
Location: Kraków, Poland

New script engine?

Post by pjj »

This is rather food for thought than a feature request; I just want to ask you to ponder it for a while.

I've been monkeying with the embedded script engine (FastScript, http://www.fast-report.com/en/products/fast-script.html) for a couple of days. It may be excellent, most probably it is, but the sad truth is this: it's documentation sucks big time. This is, of course, fault of FastScript author, who published its (very rough) specs in 2005 and then got tired, and never updated it. Oh, well. Now, my question is: could we have, sometime in the future, a better scripting engine? Even more versatile and powerful? With better documentation? Better community support? Being actively developed? Lamentably, I am not a real hacker (even though I read Hacker News on a daily basis :wink:) and I know next to nothing about all them programming languages, but I would like to ask you to have a closer look at... Lua.
Lua (/ˈluːə/ LOO-ə; from Portuguese: lua meaning "moon") is a lightweight multi-paradigm programming language designed as a scripting language with "extensible semantics" as a primary goal. Lua is cross-platform since it is written in ISO C.[1] Lua has a relatively simple C API compared to other scripting languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_%28pr ... anguage%29
There's a binding for many languages, among them, of course, Pascal: http://luapascal.luaforge.net/ Lua becomes more and more popular, so to learn it in order to write scripts in RJ TE would be a valuable advantage. Need I say it's free? (It's MIT licensed, so--if I understand it correctly--you could use it at will: "[MIT License] is a permissive free software license license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software provided all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms.")

As I said, a food for thought.
Alium tibi quaere fratrem; hic, quem tuum putas, meus est. Titus Flāvius Caesar Vespasiānus Augustus
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