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io.popen being back is really Good News... hip, hip, hooray!!!

As to bitops, hex numbers et.al, I'd really like to see a permanent solution that in my opinion goes way further than just that. Recent LuaX releases experiment with built-in "enumeration" int32 types, which in my opinion is The Way to Go. Reasons?

Simply giving bitwise operations to programmers is a no-no. C does this, and its enumerations are way too soft to provide any kind of safety nets for the poor fellows. The main issue is, a flag should only be usable with values it was intended to be used with. You know what I mean?

Now, in Lua there would be two ways to address this. Either do the wrap-ups so that binary fields are represented to the application programmer as tables (say, screen.format), or to use hard typed enumerations. Perhaps these two could be combined, but I haven't looked into that, yet.

n.b. normally the only place where enums are defined (within LuaX) are the C modules. This comes from the simple reason that any bitfields normally are used only in contact with C code. In Lua only world, there are other ways.

-ak


Mike Pall kirjoitti 4.9.2005 kello 15.24:


...

The one good thing about Lua 5.1 alpha that hasn't been mentioned
yet: io.popen is back!

That said, I still want hex numbers and bit functions. I think
I'll make a patch ... :-)

Bye,
     Mike