Re: The ~

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>From erik@hougaard.com  Fri Mar 17 15:04:02 2000
>
>I'm thinking of redefining the ~ (tilde) to something that more
>accessable on a european keyboard.

You're free to do as you please, but just don't call the resulting language Lua.

>In Denmark it AltGr-^+Space (Three
>keys) to get the tilde cause it treated as a accent to be able to make
>ãõñ etc.. 

We would have the same problem here in Brazil: ã and õ are *very* common in
portuguese.
Isn't it a problem of the editor or something like this?
(I for one use vi with one set of macros for programming and a different
set of macros for writing portuguese text. But please let's not get into a
religious war about editors and such.)

>What is the purpose for the choice of this character ??? .. Why not use
>! just like C C++ etc.. 

I confess that one of the initial choices in the design of Lua was that it
should not be similar to C, because we were targeting end users, not experienced
programmers.
To us, ~ reads naturally as "not" and so ~= reads naturally as "not equal".
Perhaps because ~ is bitwise-not in C...

Anyway, it's not something that can be changed now. Sorry.
--lhf