Could you elaborate on that? I think this is just a case of the Lua authors being too academic to let implementation details mess with the semantics too much. T

Could you elaborate on that? I think this is just a case of the Lua authors being too academic to let implementation details mess with the semantics too much. They say that there is lots of tradeoff involved but they only mentioned using simpler dynamic typin instead of sophisticated static typing and a very barebones module system.Keep in mind that they don't have to compare with other existing implementations like the Common Lisp example though. That said, Lua has evolved considerably over the years, specially the embedding API (I belive it has been completely redesigned more then once). Sometimes thery added changes that made the API simpler (for example, globals used to be accessed using special functions, now they use table lookup, as mentioned in the article). Other times, things were originaly limited due to the implementation, but they got "cleaned up" in latter versions (upvalues gave way to proper lexical scope, "tags" became a more general metatable system, etc).