LUA SHELL & others through shell

[william griffin]

I was just answering someones post over here
http://www.createmacgames.org/forum/posting.php? 
sid=31528cc8cb2dbbbfff31e013c22bd4c8

and cobbled together this LUA Shell stack as a distraction
http://www.igame3d.com/rev/LUASHELL.zip
There's a Mac OS X application and instructions for installing LUA in  
the read me.
Windows and other *Nix devs will have to find there own way using the  
stack and lua "install" file.

It works, from what I've tested, I can run LUA in rev, and I did a  
similar trick with
ChipmunkBasic  http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic
the other day through shell() (reason I was asking about man page  
formatting)

I can't help but think there is a better way to send commands to a  
program
running in unix other than : shell(<the program name> & cr & <a field  
full of commands>)
It seems to me that simply using shell() doesn't open the process  
permanently
like sending the command to terminal.

Maybe somewhere in the other language/ environment/ whatisit I should
have some statements to read and write data back and forth
to and from the rev application/standalone via sockets?

Using open process and read from process doesn't
get me any results other than errors when
using examples directly from the documentation

Using the other languages directly through shell is the only way I can  
think
of using their scripts/code/what have you without begging the  
developers to write externals,
and/or writng extensive "if line X of language Y says Z then do  
something" scripts.

Any thoughts?

Mr Bill