Is he (Robert Virding) looking for a lightweight, Turing-complete data description language extension? I started using Lua because I needed to gather logs from

Is he (Robert Virding) looking for a lightweight, Turing-complete data description language extension? I started using Lua because I needed to gather logs from many different systems and build timelines around the events to identify patterns across all the aggregated data. The logs were large, and the metadata was often very complicated. I looked at several SQL-like solutions, and at Perl extensions on CPAN. After lots of googling, it finally occurred to me that I might need a programming language that had been designed with efficient data description as a high priority. I was surprised that a streamlined "little" language like Lua fit my requirements [0]. I was expecting to have to learn something big, complicated and esoteric. I needed my resulting datasets to be portable between various Unixes, and fairly standalone. Because of the long load times, I didn't want to use a tool that required any more processing steps on input than absolutely necessary. While serialized Lua tables are more verbose than CSV, they do compress well. They are also valid Lua programs. They can include metadata of arbitrary complexity, and even turing-complete snippets to modify expression of the data as it is loaded. Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) had many languages to choose from for his "data structure server". The next major release of Redis will have a Lua interpreter. [1] I don't know Erlang well enough to guess -- is a valid Erlang program an appropriate way to store a large amount of polymorphic data? Is Lua perhaps a better way to approach this problem? [0] "Lua as a data description language (Dimitris Papavasiliou)" http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2004-06/msg00028.html http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2004-06/msg00028.html [1] "Short term Redis plans" http://antirez.com/post/short-term-redis-plans.html http://antirez.com/post/short-term-redis-plans.html