You see things as they are; and you ask, "Why?" But I dream of things that never were; and I ask, "Why not?"
-- George Bernard Shaw
lua2ps parses and consumes Lua 5.1 source code and produces its equivalent in PostScript.
It is very nearly capable of running luaqrcode.
I hadn't had much experience with the Lua programming language, and zero experience with PostScript. I thought this would be a great way to learn each of them in intricate detail, and software transformation has been a long-time favorite of mine.
- Lua 5.1
- Ghostscript 9.x
- Andre Murbach Maidl's lua-parser
- Craig Barnes' lpeg
To get lua-parser and lpeg with luarocks (preferred) simply use:
luarocks install --local lua-parser
Well, you probably don't want to. I can't imagine any reason why anyone would want to write Lua code and have it interpreted by a PostScript interpreter. Perhaps you'd like to create PostScript documents using a newer programming language with infix notation; modularity; functional and object-oriented programming; closure scopes; dynamic arrays, hash tables, and strings as primitive types; first-class functions; variadic argument lists, and other popular and elegant features. It is not without its flaws but it isn't bad.
In contrast, PostScript is an old stack machine language, with dozens of primitive types, and reads like RPN. It has hash tables, strings, and arrays, but their backing storage must dimensioned manually. PostScript is overspecialized in the extreme. Nobody programs PostScript by hand, but it was once a popular output format describing a paper document, either for a physical printer or an on-screen renderer.
Setting this aside, you can clone the repo, and run all 29 tests (of which 26 currently pass!) with ./runtests.sh. This will require a UNIX or Linux operating system and a copy of the GhostScript PostScript interpreter.