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I'm not disagreeing with your assessment that lua has serious warts (that have basically no upside, unlike say no "true" integer type, which has pros and cons). I'm just saying your portrayal is a bit lopsided, there are various aspects in which lua is a more elegant design than other dynamically typed languages like python, ruby, perl, scheme etc. I.e. small footprint and good embedding story are not the only merits of the language.

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I've problems at recognizing any significant part of Lua that is better designed than Ruby, from the POV of the language itself, pretending implementations do not exist. But this is just a personal POV so we could argue forever. I also bet that a very good subset of Ruby could be implemented with a similar-sized code base than Lua (but not at the same speed probably).

> a very good subset of Ruby could be implemented with a similar-sized code base than Lua

That would have to be quite the subset. The Ruby parser alone is almost 12kLOC. I've implemented entire languages in 1/10th that.

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/parse.y

mruby (http://mruby.org/, https://github.com/mruby/mruby) is the official attempt to do just that. Depending on what you count it's around 30-60kLOC. It has a standalone bytecode compiler, so the parser (which is "only" 6kLOC) doesn't have to be a part of the runtime.

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