RE: Coroutine support in 4.1 / IPC mechanisms

[Martin Hollis <martin.hollis@...>]

lhf wrote:
> - suport for multithreads and coroutines

Co-routines: Excellent. At the least I expect all the game developers will 
be pleased. Which seems to be about half the list.



> - suport for wchar (preparing for unicode)

I can imagine some people need to store more than ASCII in lua strings. I 
can even imagine that we might use this feature for game localization. 
Adding it seems the right thing to do... but please avoid bloat. Is there 
demand for this feature? Is UTF-8 the answer?



>   (a)=3; (print or write)(9)

Increased semicolon reliance sounds fragile. And the benefit in this 
example seems small. I think lua already has a good selection of ways to 
shoot yourself in the foot.



> We'll do something more general: you'll be able to compile Lua wth different
> "personalities": integer, float, 16-bit, wchar, multithreaded, etc.,
> by adding a user-defined header file luser.h.

I trust this will not involve #if spaghetti?

(Incidentally are you aware that 'luser' is a mild derogatory term for 
computer users with little technical knowledge?)



> - weak tables
> - more general syntax for function definition and expressions:
>   function a.b.c.d.e.f (...) end

> - names for user created types
> - secure binary dostring/dofile
> - new functions (time/date, tmpfile, unwrap, require)
> - positon capture in string matching
> - better handling of userdata/tags
> - faster VM (!)


On the subject of adding features, I would like to say a few words:

Please continue to stubbornly resist the temptation to add features that 
benefit a few. I hope that lua 10 will be more powerful and simpler than 
lua 4. There are other languages that have many features.

In my view the soul of lua is power through simplicity.

M.