Eclipse C/C++ Development Toolkit (CDT)

Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment or IDE. The Eclipse was originally created by IBM, but the Eclipse Foundation has since taken over direction and development of the project. Eclipse started out as a Java IDE, but has since grown into much more.

C/C++ development with the Eclipse Platform

This article, which is a follow-up to “C/C++ development with the Eclipse Platform,” is intended for C++ developers who want to learn C++ development using the Eclipse CDT. A simple C++ application is developed in the article. The application makes use of the C++ STL. Readers should be familiar with the STL, as well as with basic object-oriented programming principles such as inheritance and polymorphism. A familiarity with Eclipse will be helpful, but is not required.

HOW TO: Use CDT and MinGW for Eclipse (i.e. develop C/C++ applications in windows)

 

 

Paso 1:

Bajar de mingw.org lo siguiente:

Paso 2:

Extraer los archivos al directorio c:mingw y instalar mingw32-make-3.80.0-3.exe en c:mingw.

Paso 3:

Agregar c:mingwbin a la variable de ambiente de sistema Paths. Verificar con el comando gcc -v .

Paso 4:

Descargar Eclipse e instalarlo.

Paso 5:

Instalar C/C++ Development Toolkit (CDT) usando el menú de actualización Help-> Software Updates -> Find and Install -> Search for new Features to Install.

Paso 6:

Crear un proyecto nuevo file->new ->Managed Make C Project.

Paso 7:

 

Agregar el archivo main.cc con el siguiente código (para probar la instalación):

#include
#include
using namespace std;

int main()
{
string yourName;

cout << “Enter your name: “;
cin >> yourName;
cout << “Hello ” + yourName << endl;
return 0;
}

 

Law of Leaky Abstractions

Una de las paradojas del desarrollo actual es que la disponibilidad de herramientas con grados de abstracción cada vez más altos ha hecho el convertirse en un programador de alto de nivel cada vez más difícil.


Si bien es cierto que se puede desarrollar en ASP .Net con el ratón, inevitablemente llega el momento del error extraño, o del requerimiento fuera del alcance de los asistentes y la ayuda en línea. La única manera de salir de esos pozos es entendiendo el código base, debajo de la capa del IDE y de los asistentes.

Point-and-click VB es un cómodo sillón, pero que flota en aguas turbulentas y más nos vale saber nadar.

Law of Leaky Abstractions:

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong.

Joel Spolsky

Ubuntu Repositories

On systems like Ubuntu, most software is packaged in nice .deb (or .rpm, like in Red Hat) files which contain the programs and libraries you need. These files can be downloaded or come in CDs (Ubuntu’s CD is full of them). Repositories are servers which contain sets of packages. You generally access them with tools like Synaptic.

These tools can list all the packages you have installed (from your kernel to your favorite application with all the libraries in between) and the packages that are available in the repositories that you have configured the tool to have access to. They also let you search for simple things like “image editor”.

These tools provide a simple, centralized method of software installation and give the distributors (who set up the repositories) a centralized way to send you updates(1) to your software.

In Ubuntu you generally want to have at least Ubuntu’s repositories (which may include the install CD) but it is not uncommon to have other repositories (from other packagers) set up.

It’s important to know that most of the tools you’ll want to use in Ubuntu are already in Ubuntu’s repositories. You can go search the internet for packages, or even source code, for others, but these will be more difficult to install and won’t, most of the time, integrate as well with your system.

So now you know: no more endless searching looking for spyware-infested shareware and freeware. The vast majority of useful software available for Linux is pre-packaged for you.

 

Components

Software in Ubuntu’s repository is divided into four categories or components – main, restricted, universe and multiverse.

Most people will use the Ubuntu Software Centre to install the software they want. But if you’re interested in learning more about the different categories of software we include, read on! Software is grouped according to our ability to maintain it and by how well it meets the goals of our free software philosophy. The standard Ubuntu installation is a collection of software from the main and restricted components. You can install additional software from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

 

Main

The main component contains applications that are free software, can be freely redistributed and are fully supported by the Ubuntu team. This includes the most popular and most reliable open-source applications available, many of which are included by default when you install Ubuntu. Software in main includes a hand-selected list of applications that the Ubuntu developers, community and users feel are most important, and that the Ubuntu security and distribution team are willing to support. When you install software from the main component, you are assured that the software will come with security updates and that commercial technical support is available from Canonical.

 

Restricted

Our commitment is to only promote free software – or software available under a free licence. However, we make exceptions for a small set of tools and drivers that make it possible to install Ubuntu and its free applications on everyday hardware. These proprietary drivers are kept in the restricted component. Please note that it may not be possible to provide complete support for this software because we are unable to fix the software ourselves – we can only forward problem reports to the actual authors. Some software from restricted will be installed on Ubuntu CDs but is clearly separated to ensure that it is easy to remove. We will only use non-open-source software when there is no other way to install Ubuntu. The Ubuntu team works with vendors to accelerate the open-sourcing of their software to ensure that as much software as possible is available under a free licence.

 

Universe

The universe component is a snapshot of the free, open-source, and Linux world. It houses almost every piece of open-source software, all built from a range of public sources. Canonical does not provide a guarantee of regular security updates for software in the universe component, but will provide these where they are made available by the community. Users should understand the risk inherent in using these packages. Popular or well supported pieces of software will move from universe into main if they are backed by maintainers willing to meet the standards set by the Ubuntu team.

 

Multiverse

The multiverse component contains software that is not free, which means the licensing requirements of this software do not meet the Ubuntu main component licence policy. The onus is on you to verify your rights to use this software and comply with the licensing terms of the copyright holder. This software is not supported and usually cannot be fixed or updated. Use it at your own risk.

 

A Quick, Tongue-in-cheek Description of the Ubuntu Repositories

  • $release: Don’t touch it, I like consistency, even with my bugs.
  • $release-security: I’ll accept patches to existing versions (and very rare version upgrades if absolutely necessary) in the process of keeping my system secure.
  • $release-updates: Okay, some bugs are worth fixing, and I trust you this much (holds up two fingers like Maxwell Smart).
  • $release-backports: I have something akin to technology ADHD, needing the latest of everything I can possibly get, but I can’t handle running the development branch.
  • $devel: I can take it. Seriously. If you break my X, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. I’ll file and maybe even fix the bugs and I’ll do it even if power management is not so much ‘managed’ as vomited all over the wall. Come get some.
  • Debian: We do the work so you don’t have to.

Source: Jeff Waugh, “Understanding the Ubuntu Package Repositories” (modestly edited, as recommended by Waugh)

 

Managing Repositories

 

Further Reading

Lubuntu is a fast and lightweight operating system developed by a community of Free and Open Source enthusiasts. The core of the system is based on Linux and Ubuntu . Lubuntu uses the minimal desktop LXDE, and a selection of light applications. We focus on speed and energy-efficiency. Because of this, Lubuntu has very low hardware requirements. Please join us and contribute to an exciting International Free and Open Source Software project. Install Lubuntu on your computer and start getting involved. Quick links for direct Downloads of the latest version:

[Download lubuntu (Intel x86) desktop CD]   [Download Torrent]

[Download lubuntu 64-bit (AMD64) desktop CD]   [Download Torrent]

[Download 64-bit Mac (AMD64) desktop image]   [Download Torrent]

PCs with the Windows 8 logo or UEFI firmware, choose the 64-bit download. Visit the help pages for more info about which download is best for you. The section discusses both the standard installs and those required for computers with low memory (RAM), old chipsets (i586) and low disk-space (netbooks).

LAME

LAME is a free software codec used to encode/compress audio into the lossy MP3 file format.

The name LAME is a recursive acronym for “LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder”.[1] Around mid-1998, Mike Cheng created LAME 1.0 as a set of modifications against the “8Hz-MP3” encoder source code. After some quality concerns raised by others, he decided to start again from scratch based on the “dist10” MPEG reference software sources. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0. The project quickly became a team project. Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on tooLAME (an MP2 encoder).

Mark Taylor then started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed, and released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/3.99/

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/lame.html

http://gabriel.mp3-tech.org/lame/

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-libraries.php

A few key improvements, in chronological order:

  • May 1999: a new psychoacoustic model (gpsycho) is released along with LAME 3.0.
  • June 1999: The first variable bitrate implementation is released. Soon after this, LAME also became able to target lower sampling frequencies from MPEG-2.
  • November 1999: LAME switches from a GPL license to an LGPL license, which allows using it with closed-source applications.
  • May 2000: the last pieces of the original ISO demonstration code are removed. LAME is not a patch anymore, but a full encoder.
  • December 2003: substantial improvement to default settings, along with improved speed. LAME no longer requires user to use complicated parameters to produce good results.
  • May 2007: default variable bitrate encoding speed is vastly improved.

Like all MP3 encoders, LAME implements some technology covered by patents owned by the Fraunhofer Society and other entities.[2] The developers of LAME do not themselves license the technology described by these patents. Distributing compiled binaries of LAME, its libraries, or programs that derive from LAME in countries that recognize those patents may be patent infringing.

The LAME developers state that, since their code is only released in source code form, it should only be considered as an educational description of an MP3 encoder, and thus does not infringe any patent by itself when released as source code only. At the same time, they advise users to obtain a patent license for any relevant technologies that LAME may implement before including a compiled version of the encoder in a product.[3] Some software is released using this strategy: companies use the LAME library, but obtain patent licenses.

In November 2005, there were reports that the Extended Copy Protection rootkit included on some Sony Compact Discs included portions of the LAME library without complying with the terms of the LGPL.[4]

Audacity is a free digital audio editor and recording application, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems.[5][4] Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University.[1] As of 10 October 2011, it was the 11th most popular download from SourceForge, with 76.5 million downloads.[7] Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.[8][9]

Articles on Writing

Whenever you feel stuck with your article writing and are facing the typical writer’s block, you should go with the ‘brain dumping’ method where you write as fast as possible without thinking twice. Just write down everything that comes into your mind, and this will help the break writer’s block that you may be experiencing. As you write down this content, the spelling, grammar and punctuation will not even be considered during this process. You will be utterly astounded by all of the content that you come up with what you have put all of your article content into written format. Later on, you can use re-structure and proof read this article to make it presentable.

Continue reading “Articles on Writing”

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the “new world” of computing exemplified by “human–computer symbiosis.”[1] It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s.

The language was first generally released as Smalltalk-80. Smalltalk-like languages are in continuing active development, and have gathered loyal communities of users around them. ANSI Smalltalk was ratified in 1998 and represents the standard version of Smalltalk.[2]

Smalltalk-80 is a totally reflective system, implemented in Smalltalk-80 itself. Smalltalk-80 provides both structural and computational reflection. Smalltalk is a structurally reflective system whose structure is defined by Smalltalk-80 objects. The classes and methods that define the system are themselves objects and fully part of the system that they help define. The Smalltalk compiler compiles textual source code into method objects, typically instances of CompiledMethod. These get added to classes by storing them in a class’s method dictionary. The part of the class hierarchy that defines classes can add new classes to the system. The system is extended by running Smalltalk-80 code that creates or defines classes and methods. In this way a Smalltalk-80 system is a “living” system, carrying around the ability to extend itself at run time.

Since the classes are themselves objects, they can be asked questions such as “what methods do you implement?” or “what fields/slots/instance variables do you define?”. So objects can easily be inspected, copied, (de)serialized and so on with generic code that applies to any object in the system.

Smalltalk-80 also provides computational reflection, the ability to observe the computational state of the system. In languages derived from the original Smalltalk-80 the current activation of a method is accessible as an object named via a pseudo-variable (one of the six reserved words), thisContext. By sending messages to thisContext a method activation can ask questions like “who sent this message to me”. These facilities make it possible to implement co-routines or Prolog-like back-tracking without modifying the virtual machine. The exception system is implemented using this facility. One of the more interesting uses of this is in the Seaside web framework which relieves the programmer of dealing with the complexity of a Web Browser’s back button by storing continuations for each edited page and switching between them as the user navigates a web site. Programming the web server using Seaside can then be done using a more conventional programming style.

When an object is sent a message that it does not implement, the virtual machine sends the object the doesNotUnderstand: message with a reification of the message as an argument. The message (another object, an instance of Message) contains the selector of the message and an Array of its arguments. In an interactive Smalltalk system the default implementation of doesNotUnderstand: is one that opens an error window (a Notifier) reporting the error to the user. Through this and the reflective facilities the user can examine the context in which the error occurred, redefine the offending code, and continue, all within the system, using Smalltalk-80’s reflective facilities.

Another important use of doesNotUnderstand: is intercession. One can create a class that does not define any methods other than doesNotUnderstand: and does not inherit from any other class. The instances of this class effectively understand no messages. So every time a message is sent to these instances they actually get sent doesNotUnderstand:, hence they intercede in the message sending process. Such objects are called proxies. By implementing doesNotUnderstand: appropriately, one can create distributed systems where proxies forward messages across a network to other Smalltalk systems (a facility common in systems like CORBA, COM+ and RMI but first pioneered in Smalltalk-80 in the 1980s), and persistent systems where changes in state are written to a database and the like. An example of this latter is Logic Arts’ VOSS (Virtual Object Storage System) available for VA Smalltalk under dual open source and commercial licensing.

Smalltalk-80 syntax is rather minimalist, based on only a handful of declarations and reserved words. In fact, only six “keywords” are reserved in Smalltalk: true, false, nil, self, super, and thisContext. These are actually called pseudo-variables, identifiers that follow the rules for variable identifiers but denote bindings that the programmer cannot change. The true, false, and nil pseudo-variables are singleton instances. self and super refer to the receiver of a message within a method activated in response to that message, but sends to super are looked up in the superclass of the method’s defining class rather than the class of the receiver, which allows methods in subclasses to invoke methods of the same name in superclasses. thisContext refers to the current activation record. The only built-in language constructs are message sends, assignment, method return and literal syntax for some objects. From its origins as a language for children of all ages, standard Smalltalk syntax uses punctuation in a manner more like English than mainstream coding languages. The remainder of the language, including control structures for conditional evaluation and iteration, is implemented on top of the built-in constructs by the standard Smalltalk class library. (For performance reasons, implementations may recognize and treat as special some of those messages; however, this is only an optimization and is not hardwired into the language syntax.)

Most popular programming systems separate static program code (in the form of class definitions, functions or procedures) from dynamic, or run time, program state (such as objects or other forms of program data). They load program code when a program starts, and any prior program state must be recreated explicitly from configuration files or other data sources. Any settings the program (and programmer) does not explicitly save must be set up again for each restart. A traditional program also loses much useful document information each time a program saves a file, quits, and reloads. This loses details such as undo history or cursor position. Image based systems don’t force losing all that just because a computer is turned off, or an OS updates.

Many Smalltalk systems, however, do not differentiate between program data (objects) and code (classes). In fact, classes are objects themselves. Therefore most Smalltalk systems store the entire program state (including both Class and non-Class objects) in an image file. The image can then be loaded by the Smalltalk virtual machine to restore a Smalltalk-like system to a prior state. This was inspired by FLEX,[12] a language created by Alan Kay and described in his M.Sc. thesis.

Other languages that model application code as a form of data, such as Lisp, often use image-based persistence as well.

Smalltalk images are similar to (restartable) core dumps and can provide the same functionality as core dumps, such as delayed or remote debugging with full access to the program state at the time of error.

Squeak is a modern, open source, full-featured implementation of the powerful Smalltalk programming language and environment. Squeak is highly-portable – even its virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from multimedia applications, educational platforms to commercial web application development.

Noteworthy uses of Squeak

  • Etoys is a powerful script-based environment to learn science and math by encouraging exploration and experimentation.
  • Pharo is a Squeak fork that focuses on web application development. The Seaside development team does its development work on Pharo.
  • Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment originally derived from Squeak with a specific set of goals: being simple and powerful.
  • Seaside is a web framework for developing complex dynamic web applications which by leveraging the Smalltalk strengths considerably ease the web application development.
  • Aida/Web is the web framework used to make this site.
  • Scratch is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art — and share their creations with one another over the Net. Scratch builds on the tradition of Logo and LEGO/Logo, but takes advantage of new computational ideas to make it easier to get started with programming (lowering the floor) and extend the range of what kids can create and learn (raising the ceiling).

See our Projects page for more!

The Squeak community is friendly and active. Here is a short list of resources that you may find useful:
www.surfscranton.com/architecture/KnightsPrinciples.htm

www.squeak.org
is the main web site of Squeak. (Do not confuse it with www.squeakland.org which is dedicated to the eToy environment built on top of Squeak but whose audience is elementary school teachers.)

www.squeaksource.com
is the equivalent of SourceForge for Squeak projects.

wiki.squeak.org/squeak
is a wiki with up-to-date information about Squeak.
About mailing-lists.
There are a lot of mailing-lists and sometimes they can be just a little bit too active. If you do not want to get flooded by mail but would still like to participate we suggest you to use
news.gmane.org
or
www.nabble.com/Squeak-f14152.html
to browse the lists.
You can find the complete list of Squeak mailing-lists at
lists.
squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo
.
Note that Squeak-dev refers to the developers’ mailing-list, which can be browsed here:
news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.general

Newbies
refers to a friendly mailing-list for beginners where any question can be asked:
news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners
(There is so much to learn that we are all beginners in some aspect of Squeak!)
IRC.
Have a question that you need answered quickly? Would you like to meet with other squeakers around the world? A great place to participate in longer-term discussions is the IRC channel on the “#squeak” channel at
irc.freenode.net
. Stop by and say “Hi!”
Other sites.
There are several websites supporting the Squeak community today in various ways. Here are some of them:
•
people.squeakfoundation.org
is the site of SqueakPeople, which is a kind of “advogato.org” for squeakers. It offers articles, diaries and an interesting trust metric system.

planet.squeak.org
is the site of PlanetSqueak which is an RSS aggregator.
It is good place to get a flood of squeaky things. This includes the latest blog entries from developers and others who have an interest in Squeak.

www.frappr.com/squeak
is a site that tracks Squeak users around the world.
Dolphin Smalltalk, or “Dolphin” for short, is an implementation of the Smalltalk programming language by Object Arts, targeted at the Microsoft Windows platform.

The last major release was Dolphin Smalltalk X6, which comes in two versions:

  • Community Edition (free)
  • Professional edition (commercial) currently in version 6.02

Dolphin is notable for its integrated development environment. The toolset of this Smalltalk dialect include an integrated refactoring browser, a package browser and a WYSIWYG “view composer”. Dolphin Smalltalk deviates from the convention of the Smalltalk MVC framework with a model-presenter-view framework.

The free community version may be one of the richest free programming environments for the Windows operating system because of the nature of the tutorials and sample applications and the rich class libraries. Other Smalltalk dialects for Windows include Smalltalk MT and the Smalltalk dialects from Cincom.

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.[1]

Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely “synthetic” voice output.[2]

The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s.

Overview of a typical TTS system

A text-to-speech system (or “engine”) is composed of two parts:[3] a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations),[4] which is then imposed on the output speech.

Here is a non-exhaustive comparison of speech synthesis programs

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. Other groups release new languages for the system. And full tools and documentation for build new voices are available through Carnegie Mellon’s FestVox project (http://festvox.org)

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML.

Festival is free software. Festival and the speech tools are distributed under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.

Text to Speech engine for English and many other languages. Compact size with clear but artificial pronunciation. Available as a command-line program with many options, a shared library for Linux, and a Windows SAPI5 version.

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.   http://espeak.sourceforge.net

eSpeak uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak is available as:

  • A command line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
  • A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
  • A SAPI5 version for Windows, so it can be used with screen-readers and other programs that support the Windows SAPI5 interface.
  • eSpeak has been ported to other platforms, including Android, Mac OSX and Solaris.

Features.

  • Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
  • Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
  • SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete), and also HTML.
  • Compact size. The program and its data, including many languages, totals about 2 Mbytes.
  • Can be used as a front-end to MBROLA diphone voices, see mbrola.html. eSpeak converts text to phonemes with pitch and length information.
  • Can translate text into phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
  • Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying stages of progress. Help from native speakers for these or other languages is welcome.
  • Development tools are available for producing and tuning phoneme data.
  • Written in C.

Lua and SciTE

SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations.

SciTE is currently available for Intel Windows (XP or later) and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows 7 and on Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 10.10 with GTK+ 2.20. Here is a screenshot of SciTE.

You can download Scintilla and SciTE.

There are some extra configuration files that can enhance SciTE for various languages and APIs.

Questions and comments about SciTE should be directed to the scite-interest mailing list, which is for discussion of SciTE and related projects, their bugs and future features. This is a low traffic list, averaging less than 50 messages per week. To avoid spam, only list members can write to the list. New versions of SciTE are announced on scite-interest and may also be received by SourceForge members by clicking on the Monitor column icon for “scite” on the downloads page.

There is a Scintilla project page hosted on Get Scintilla at SourceForge.net. Fast, secure and Free Open Source software downloads

Lua’s name is not an acronym. It is properly spelled as “Lua” or occasionally “lua”, but never “LUA”. See lua.org/about.html for the whole story.

First of all work your way through the Programming in Lua, it should take you a day or two to get the gist of Lua. The book is free online. Besides it is the best tutorial out there on Lua,

Also: If you’re purpose is Lua for World of Warcraft (probably not but just in case) you can check out this tutorial

And: Here is a tips and tricks thread on StackOverflow, might help give you some ideas of what to expect from Lua

Suggested Programs/Exercises:

Since you’re initially looking at Lua for web development try to understand and improve the Data Description example in PIL. It’ll give you a few good ideas and a nice feel for the power or Lua.

Then you might want to try out playing with the Data Structures chapter, although Lua has a single complex data-type, the Table, that chapter will show you Lua-like ways to make a table do anything you need.

Finally once you begin to grok metatables you should design a class system (yes with Lua you decide how your class system works). I’m sure everyone that knows Lua has made a dozen class systems, a good chapter to get you started on a class system is Object-Oriented Programming

And if you got time and know C or something like that (C# and Java included) try extending an application with Lua, but that’ll take a week or two to do