Re: [RFD] Unified Methods

[Reuben Thomas <rrt1001@...>]

> There is also another aspect about compatibility: learning Lua. For 
> instance, I am halfway in writing a book about Lua programming, and every 
> change in the language makes my book obsolete! Also, now it is not uncommon 
> to see job offers asking for Lua programmers; if the language changes too 
> much, they will have to add a qualifier to those adds ("Lua 3.2 
> programmer", for instance ;-) 

These are both good points, although I'm not sure that books will remain
for much longer a major source of information on programming languages,
and electronic editions are much easier to keep up to date. Besides, one
of the nice things about Lua is precisely that (if you're already a
programmer) you can learn it quite happily from the manual.

The job ads is a reasonable point, but I don't think the industry has a
problem with ads saying "HTML required" even though that's a much worse
moving target (XML? DHTML? Lua-CGI?!).

> PS: of course, we are not "in the mood" for changes right now, as we are 
> near the final release of Lua 4.0, and we want to keep our promisse: "we 
> intend it [the beta version] to be as final as possible." 

On the other hand, this is probably the best time to talk about changes to
go into future versions, precisely because the authors will not be having
strong ideas in that direction themselves, as they concentrate on the
upcoming release.

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