#48

A bit of an aside, but: is there any reason why Lua on the norns is 5.1.5 (dated Feb 2012)? Latest official release is 5.3.5.

#49

noā€¦ thatā€™s weird. it must be whatever comes with raspbian stretch.

the lua environment that actually runs norns scripts is 5.3 (we just link from liblua5.3-dev)

#50

Oh - it never occurred to me that the norms environment would be running something other than the default /usr/bin/lua. Does the 5.3 installation have a command line component? I want something for running unit tests. (Matron might do that for me, but Iā€™m not seeing any summary output from them.)

#51

I ran into this the other day when trying to run some unit tests. The lua 5.3.x command line is available as a separate package (which is not installed in the norns image by default). I did the following on my dev device.

  • sudo apt-get install lua5.3
  • Install luarocks
  • luarocks install luaunit

One has to invoke lua5.3 explicitly to get the newer runtime.

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#52

Thanks for that - I was wondering about the wisdom of doing an apt-get install - though as a Mac user I suppose I could just SMB-mount the norns drive and run a Homebrew-installed Lua from macOS insteadā€¦

#53

I find it useful to have a functional environment on both the device and my laptop. When working on particularly ambitious projects I separate code into norns specific and platform independent so that a subset of the tests can be run off device.

#54

Quite so. The lower-level grid driving code probably wonā€™t get added to the tests, but Iā€™ll keep that as simple as possible. The complex higher level stuff is (or will be) pure Lua, and I can probably mock the lower-level stuff for testing if I need to.

#55

out of curiosity have any first time programmers had success reading through Programming in Lua?

I thought it was pretty well written but I had prior programming experience before going into it

2 Likes
#56

Nope, might try gradually

seems comprehensive (and therefore somewhat daunting)

2 Likes
#57

same. looks like a great resource, but today i was reading microsound, then started max/msp free trial, and then tried reading this and it was a bit of an overload lol :face_with_head_bandage: thanks 4 sharing tho ~

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#58

yea, fair enough, i was relying on it more for the advanced topics but the starter pages are probably a little too dense

#59

how do people feel about the english language syntax in lua (i.e. if then end do) ? as an experienced programmer itā€™s a minor annoyance, but for newcomers, Iā€™m curious if itā€™s helped anyone come to grips with the logical operations or made code more readable compared to c-style:

if (true) {
    thing()
} else {
    otherthing()
}

technically lua was my first programming language and my intro to these concepts, but I do not remember back that far : )

#60

I forget the then almost every time

1 Like
#61

donā€™t get me started on if do

#62

the thing that bothers me is the other way round, writing some javascript after a session of lua writing adding in then from muscle memory constantly

#63

I think itā€™s especially weird if you take C code (or most other languages) and directly translate it to Lua. On the other hand, if you change your naming conventions to fit it can be very elegant IMO.

A bad example: if shirt:isdirty() then wash() end.

If you see then and end as syntax, itā€™s kinda the same thing. then == {, and end == }.

3 Likes
#64

the way i approached the book was to make notes about anything i found weird coming to it from java/c#/c background. there are several notes that end with ā€œreally?!ā€ or ā€œwtf?ā€. i think one was about the way the ternary if is doneā€¦

#65

luaā€™s ternary if kinda feels like a secret key combo power move in a video game : )

not highly readable though, especially when the condition has and or or

1 Like
#66

yep! this all sounded familiar, thatā€™s because i posted about it before: (grid) Code examples

#67

I had a laugh writing this today

return (type(x) == 'number') and ((i > 1) and 0 or x) or (x[i] or x[i-1] or ((i > 1) and 0 or x[1]))

(it works!)