Thomas Wrensch

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I'm a professor of computer science at the University of the Pacific [1]. I become interested in Lua when I was looking into scripting languages as part of my Dissertation research into programming of computationally enhanced physical objects.

Since then I've used the stand-alone version of Lua for many quick-and-dirty tasks, and found it has some qualities I really like. The most important (to me) are:

It's small enough that I can remember how to use it after not using it for a few weeks (my biggest complaint with Python).
It has lexical scoping and closures (at least in Lua 5).
It can be used to do object-oriented programming.
It does not have strongly typed variables, which I have found to be more of a constraint than anything else for the kinds of programs I write.

I've also put up a SituationScheduler page that is a variation a coroutine scheduler I posted to the list some time ago. I think this scheduler is a better fit for many game and simulation systems that don't want the overhead of full multithreading.

You can out more at my home page [2]. I have a few goodies on a page dedicated to Lua [3] (Out of date now, I will update to Lua 5 soon).

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Last edited January 30, 2004 7:49 am GMT (diff)