Re: snapshot of Lua 4.1 (work)

["John Belmonte" <jvb@...>]

What I'm happy about most with this snapshot, more than any of the new
features, is the clean-up of the Lua number type.  This will eliminate much
of the hacking I have to do every time a new version is released.  I did
notice a dangling double however, in llimits.h:

    union L_Umaxalign { double d; void *s; long l; };

should probably be:

    union L_Umaxalign { lua_Number d; void *s; long l; };

However a similar issue, controlling what the implementation uses for a
"long", still needs some work.  I noticed that many of the local variables
that used to be longs without a good reason are now ints, which helps to
reduce the problem.  However I'd really like a single place where the
implementation's notion of a "long" is defined with a macro, and that macro
to be used consistently in the code.  For example I use a macro LLNG, and so
the Instruction typedef would become:

    typedef unsigned LLNG Instruction;

On my platform I need to replace all long's (64-bit) with int's (32-bit).
One reason is the memory savings, although this is mainly addressed by the
Instruction typedef that already exists.  The other reason is that my
compiler generates inefficient code for 64-bit operations, especially
conversion between long integer and floating point.

It's not much work, here are the current long references:

    include\lauxlib.h(62): #define luaL_check_long(L,n)
((long)luaL_check_number(L, n))
    include\lauxlib.h(64): #define luaL_opt_long(L,n,d)
((long)luaL_opt_number(L, n,d))
    src\llimits.h(49): typedef unsigned long lu_mem;
    src\llimits.h(52): typedef long ls_nstr;
    src\llimits.h(85): union L_Umaxalign { double d; void *s; long l; };
    src\llimits.h(95): typedef unsigned long Instruction;
    src\lundump.c(222): if ((long)f!=(long)tf)
    src\lib\lbaselib.c(107): unsigned long n;
    src\lib\liolib.c(378): long offset = luaL_opt_long(L, 3, 0);
    src\lib\lstrlib.c(21): typedef long sint32;

With that I could finally remove an item from my Lua warts list  ;)

Regards,
-John