Re: Should tiny utilities be prepackaged?
[
Date Prev][
Date Next][
Thread Prev][
Thread Next]
[
Date Index]
[
Thread Index]
- Subject: Re: Should tiny utilities be prepackaged?
- From: Peter Aronoff <telemachus@...>
- Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2016 07:27:34 -0500
Pierre Chapuis <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:
> I don't know about you but here are some of the kinds of things
> I have in my own "utils" section in most of my Lua projects:
>
> - a function that reads a whole file to a string by path;
This sounds like a popular Perl module, slurp. (I'd be curious to see the
code for this.)
> I don't think those should be in the Lua standard library though, and
> they take so little code in pure Lua that they do not really make sense
> in a separate module.
I think the "so little code" argument cuts both ways. If they take *so
little* code and *so many* Lua programmers have to write them, then it does
begin to make sense to include them in the standard library. In particular,
I really think the standard library should include a printf function.
In any case, here are the things I use pretty constantly but don't think
are worth sharing formally:
+ printf() : just what you think it is and
+ writef() : like printf() but write the string to a specified filehandle
+ exists() : test if a file exists
+ clone() and same() : deep-copy a table and test the equality of two tables
+ info(), warn(), quit(), die() : print message to stdout or stderr, exit
with success or failure and print a message to stdout or stderr; all the
functions can print a formatted string and all of them give you a final
newline for free (kind of like baby's first logger)
I also often use collection helpers like map(), reduce(), etc., but for
those I made a more formal module[1] because I wanted all the functions twice:
once for list-like tables and once for hash-like tables.
The only thing in this group I would seriously suggest as a Lua built-in is
printf.
Best, Peter
[1] https://bitbucket.org/telemachus/tableutils
--
We have not been faced with the need to satisfy someone else's
requirements, and for this freedom we are grateful.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System