Re: co-routines [was Re: Unicode]

[Reuben Thomas <rrt1001@...>]

> Discussions are very difficult if you get no response...  I guess that
> most subscribers are programmers but there have been not very much
> discussions about new ideas and their implementation.  Pretty strange.

The majority of people on this list seem to be people with a pressing need
for a scripting language to embed. Also, they're using Lua as part of
their work.

Not so many who are looking at Lua for fun.

I am interested in language changes, but so far have been preoccupied with
my EPOC port, which has borne much fruit: AFAICS Lua has jumped from
nowhere to be the third most interesting (and possibly used) language on
EPOC.

I did look at the code a couple of days ago thinking about reversing local
and global default scope, but as yet I haven't got my head round it. I'm
interested in Sol to see the sort of techniques involved in changing
Lua; I understand that the local/global thing's already been done, along
with some other changes I like the sound of.

I'm quite happy to share ideas.

The main one I haven't seen on the list yet is making code first class. A
code block should be a table of statements, so instead of

do ... end

you write (in unsugared notation)

{ ... }

This allows code to be manipulated by programs. It should be kept in
compiled form (so I'm not quite sure how to deconstruct code, as in Lisp
or Smalltalk), and you could have a modification flag on tables so as not
to have to recompile them every time they are executed.

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | maxim, n.  wisdom for fools