Ubuntu repositories but is not covered in this chapter.
Lua
Lua is a scripting language created in Brazil in the 1990s. It is similar to and
based on Scheme. It is a dynamically typed procedural language with memory
management and garbage collection. It is small and often used for embedded
applications. It can be compiled on any platform that has a C compiler. Lua is
also extensible, with a reputation for being simple without being simplistic. It
was originally designed for extending applications but is frequently used for
standalone and general-purpose needs.
To use Lua on Ubuntu, you write programs in your favorite text editor. To run
them, you need the package lua50, which is the Lua interpreter. Run a
program by entering lua programName at the command line.
Mono
Although Microsoft intended it for Windows, the Microsoft .NET platform
has grown to encompass many other operating systems. No, this isn’t a rare
sign of Microsoft letting customers choose which OS is best for them.
Instead, the spread of .NET is because of the Mono project, which is a free
reimplementation of .NET available under the GPL license.
Because of the potential for patent complications, it took most distros a long
time to incorporate Mono, but it’s here now and works just fine. What’s more,
Mono supports both C# and Visual Basic .NET, as well as the complete .NET
1.0 and 1.1 Frameworks (and much of the 2.0 Framework, too), making it
easy to learn and productive to use.
You can learn more about Mono from http://mono-project.com. In any case,
to compile your own programs in Mono on Ubuntu, you need to install the
mono-devel package.
OCaml
Functional programming never really goes away. Sometimes the most elegant
way to write something is not by using a class or a method or a framework.
Sometimes, the most elegant implementation is simply a function. This is why
Lisp endures and why newer languages like OCaml and Haskell appear. Well,
we say “appear,” but in reality OCaml is a modern dialect of a very old