Colin Watson wrote:
I'd rather that the tools in Debian base were written in a high-level language where available. Take away Perl and you've got only shell, C, and C++ left; I don't think that's going to improve security in practice.
Lua is a modern high-level language. Its 15K stand-alone interpreter depends on only two libraries which total less than 200K. The functionality of its standard libraries are limited by ANSI C, but there are are third party libraries for talking to the OS, such as a POSIX library.
Someone less averse to prefix notation than I might make the same argument about scsh. It's larger and has more dependencies, but on the other hand has full library support for system programming.
Why not consider tiny languages? -- http:// if le.o /