Re: globals (_locals)

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> Even though I do think it makes certain bugs less likely, is that reason
> enough to change it?

Yes, because this particular change is a big improvement. Like automatic
garbage collection and getting rid of pointers, it's the sort of feature
that is included in most new languages, because it's better than the
alternatives.

BTW, as regards the rest of the discussion about how to do this, I'd favour
a simple breaking change over a complex non-breaking one. Let's not forget
that Lua is not being used to rewrite large amounts of reusable code at the
moment (precisely because of the lack of features like this), so it's still
(just about) OK to make (calculated) breaking changes. It seems that most
projects that use Lua stick with a particular version.

Nevertheless, it'd be better to find a non-breaking change, and good to
allow both styles of programming for a while with a backwards-compatibility
#define, as used for other obsolescent features at present.

It'd be nice to see the current proposals laid out thusly: first, what would
local-by-default syntax look like in an ideal world (i.e. if you could make
breaking changes); and then how does it have to be modified to make it
non-breaking? Then it's clearer what's at stake.

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | egrep, n.  a bird that debugs bison