Xmake uses lua if you want to give it a try.

He did write ‘awful,’ which is a fair description of the experience of writing Lua.

I don’t mean that as an insult to Lua’s creators. They seem like really smart fellows. It’s just that the language is (to my eyes, with my background) viciously ugly. And 1-based arrays, of course, are evil.

It has some neat ideas, though, and it is supposed to be very easy to integrate into a project. But man, that syntax …

1-based arrays are fully optional in Lua. You can use -2-indexed arrays instead, should you wish to.

Ah good old $[ in perl.

I kind of agree, but it's still far better than CMake's custom language IMO.

I suspect that INTERCAL would be better than CMake's own language.