this is just a listing of some facts I find fun about some of my favourite CS projects.
all of what’s listed here should be taken with a grain of salt, as most things written here were based off of my own research, but you can always tell me at this page’s Github repository’s issues, and I will gladly fix any errors.
currently there’s only one fact:
ok, so this one is a bit funny:
basically, Lua was originally made as a replacement for Tcl, LISP, Scheme and Python (which was in it’s infancy at the time), with it’s first version (1.0) internally available at PUC in 1993, and its version 1.1 made public and used for showcase as a programming language for extending applications in a seminar on software and hardware in the same place in 1994.
in the paper written for that seminar, the following snippet can be found:
Lua provides some automatic type conversions. A string taking part in an arithmetic operation is converted to a number, if possible. Conversely, whenever a number is used when a string is expected, that number is converted to a string. This coercion is useful because it simplifies programs and avoids the need for explicit conversion functions.
Javascript was originally released in 1995 for the Netscape web browser. so, canonically, Lua had automatic type conversions before Javascript even released, and still has them to this day! of course, much more sanely than JavaScript.