built-in scripting languages

[Derek Pressnall]

> I would recommend lua,

It does look pretty good, I've taken a brief look at it.  In fact, I'm
in the processing of porting c/invoke over to 2e (c/invoke was
originally done for / as part of lua, I think), due to a user's
request.

A couple of the design considerations for the 2e language that sets it
apart from other languages, I feel, are that the core interpreter is
kept small so that it can be easily understood / studied (a side
project of mine is to write up an interpreter development tutorial),
and the language itself has very little syntax to it so it is easy to
pick up.  This second feature is what can make it useful to embed into
other applications -- the syntax sort of disappears.  All you have is
a few new operators (in addition to the standard algebraic ones), most
of which are in other languages such as C.

But, I agree that 2e is still too immature to be used in a product
this soon (although I don't think there are any outstanding bugs in
the core, and the feature set has mostly stabalized).  I also like the
idea of accessing javascript from outside of a web browser that Bryan
mentioned, but this may be less accessable (i.e., learning curve) for
some users.

On a different (but related) track, I've always wanted to have a web
browser that was capable of executing local cgi scripts without the
need for client-side http server.  This way, you could code up local
applets using the same tools for developing web applications, yet they
would run entirely on your local device.  So your application launch
script would be:
  /usr/bin/web-browser http:///usr/local/myapp/index.html
--local-cgi=/usr/local/myapp/cgi