GDB and scripting languages - which

[Robert Dewar]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Anyway, two advantages of Lua are:
> 
>   . It was designed from ground up to be primarily an extension
>     language, not a general-purpose language that just happens to have
>     C bindings for its interpreter; therefore it is small and
>     efficient (by a large factor compared to Tcl, for example).
> 
>   . It's typeless and generally lacks the clutter that more
>     ``complete'' programming languages require: type declarations,
>     memory allocations, initialization before use, etc.

To me, the fundamental requirement for a language to be used for
writing gdb scripts (I refuse to use the bogus term scripting
language :-)) is that it be widely used and widely familiar
as well as being a decently designed language. To me Python
meets these criteria, Lua does not. Mere technical arguments
are not enough for a choice in a case like this.