To Jeff/Uwe...just asking...

[Graham Douglas]

To Jeff/Uwe

I'm a bit wary of asking the following, tentative, question
because I'm sure to be exposing my fundamental
ignorance of Lout for the world to see. Oh well, here goes...

The @Filter allows you to run commands, but, I guess,
if you had *a lot* of these, it would greatly slow
Lout as it repeatedly executed system(...)
commands -- and all the file I/O etc. 
(or would it?)

Is it possible that one could, somehow,
link directly to a scripting language? Perhaps add a new
primitive called, say, @Script{scripting commands}? 
I have no idea, as yet, how you could, if at all, communicate 
anything back to Lout.

On Windows, I'm thinking of, say, a DLL which 
contains the scripting engine (Lua
in my case) and you could, say, load/initialise the
Lua interpreter on Lout start-up (clean up on
Lout exit) to provide some efficient
way to makes calls to the interpreter... 

Could this be done?
Would it be useful?
Should I go and see a doctor?

I can't think, as yet, how you could make full
use of this... just exploring, that's all -- a bit of
speculative thinking out load :-)

Yours, in wild speculation, 

Graham