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Comment by LeafStorm | Hacker News Reader

First, Lua is not spelled in all caps, because it is a Portuguese word. That would be like spelling PYTHON in all caps.

Second, Lua is the faster than any interpreted "scripting" language I know of. And if you use LuaJIT, performance can even approach that of compiled languages such as C.

And third, a completely Lua OS is a long-term goal. As I understand it, the main focus of the project at this point is the creation of Safe Lua, then to slowly replace Linux-based userland parts with Lua-based parts.

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>First, Lua is not spelled in all caps, because it is a Portuguese word. That would be like spelling PYTHON in all caps.

That argument is orthogonal to whether Lua should or should not be spelled in all-caps. Besides being a Portuguese word, it's also the name for a programming language, and that use could have a different spelling rule.

For example a "gnu" is an english world (an animal of the antelope family), but we spell the organization that bears a gnu as it's logo: GNU.

Same for Python. Actually, Python servers as a counter-argument to your point, because we spell it "Python" (initial cap) whereas if we treated it as an english word it would be just "python".

It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact. I'm not more than a Lua dilettante, yet I know this. The name derives from a Portugese word, so it should be treated as a proper noun, not an acronym.

EDIT: iPad completion snafu.

EDIT: For example a "gnu" is an english world (an animal of the antelope family), but we spell the organization that bears a gnu as it's logo: GNU.

GNU is an acronym, which is why it's spelled that way, which is stated on their websites.

>It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact. I'm not a more than a Lua dilettante, yet I know this. The name derives from a Portugese word, so it should be treated as a pronoun, not an acronym.

And again, the fact that the name derives from an actual word tells us nothing about how we should treat a language that uses it.

For example, I can make a language called "table" and specify in the docs and faq that it should be written as TABLE (all caps).

Also: "pronoun"? Huh? Pronouns are words like "his", "him" etc. Perhaps you meant "noun"? Still, we don't treat either nouns or pronouns with an initial capital mid-sentence, whereas for Lua we do.

>GNU is an acronym, which is why it's spelled that way, which is stated on their websites.

My point is, the spelling is a arbitrary decision by the project. Notice how, despite it being an acronym they don't write G.N.U, but GNU (and keep the gnu animal imagery). They could have dictated for us to spell it gnu or Gnu or G.n.u, just as easily.

Case in point: the BETA programming language is spelled in all-caps despite BOTH not being and acronym AND being a proper english word.

Excellent points. According to the project site, "Lua" is correct.

> "Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun. More specifically, "Lua" is a name, the name of the Earth's moon and the name of the language. Like most names, it should be written in lower case with an initial capital, that is, "Lua". Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing, because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different people. So, please, write "Lua" right!

("What's in a name?" from http://www.lua.org/about.html)

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