Lua

I watched Anders Hejlsberg’s, chief designer of the C# programming language, developer keynote at TechDays 2010 ‘Trends and future directions in programming languages’.

Here are some the things that caught my attention. The video is worth checking out.  Read more...

Language trends

• The abstraction level continues to rise and there is no indication this will stop
  • Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, Java and C#

Three major trends that are influencing current thinking

• Declarative: Domain specific Languages, Functional Programming
• In the last 5 years, dynamic programming. JavaScript wars
• Concurrency, multi and many core

Colleague Mike Davey was talking about hosting a scripting engine in his WPF application. He is at a choice point and is considering LUA, PowerShell, IronPython or IronRuby.

One question he has is how to pass part of your object model into PowerShell so you can manipulate it with script.

This short screen cast shows how to host the PowerShell scripting engine, create a variable and set it to a WPF visual control. You can use this approach to set variables to instances of your object model as well.

Nua – Lua for the DLR. Source for only the basics has been posted.

Has anyone of you tried the programming language Lua? If not, you should. It integrates quite nicely into C/C++, and perhaps C# (??)

Anyway, I am building a generic interface between C++ and Lua, to take advantage of the meta programming facilities found in C++.

I can steer the compiler to generate specific code for specific C++ types.

Ok, I must show you an example!  Read more...