Lua is faster than Fortran???

[sturlamolden]

On 4 Jul, 14:29, David Cournapeau <courn... at gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually, I think the main reason why Lua is much faster than other
> dynamic languages is its size. The language is small. You don't list,
> dict, tuples, etc...

They have managed to combine list and dict into one type (table) that
does the job of both. And yes there are tuples.

There are no classes, but there are closures and other building blocks
that can be used to create any object-oriented type system (just like
CLOS is defined by Lisp, not a part of the basic Lisp syntax). So I
imagine it would be possible to define an equivalent to the Python
type system in Lua, and compile Python to Lua. Lua can be compiled to
Lua byte code. Factoring Lua, out that means we should be able to
compile Python to Lua byte code.