A blog by Devendra Tewari
I am not a big fan of arcane languages. When possible, I like to stick to mainstream languages. Sometimes, though, our work does drive us to some strange languages. Like Visual TCL, a toolkit for the SCO Unix operating system that I used in the final year of my BE degree.
I have mostly steered away from other popular languages such as Perl and Python. I started learning Lua when doing dissector development for Wireshark—quite skeptically at first, but I am fairly impressed by it.
I don’t want this post to be long, so I’ll quickly list those bits and pieces that are rarely seen in mainstream languages
Arrays as tables of key/value pairs, or associative arrays
Multiple return values from functions
A generic for loop, which in combination with multiple return values from functions, leads to some pretty strange possibilities
Named arguments to functions using tables
Closures and the ability to redefine any function, allowing for convenient sandboxing