There's a few solutions I can think of to the newlines problem:
+ Add a new extra boolean parameter to io.lines() to specify that you
want to preserve them
+ Allow functions passed to load() to return multiple strings instead
of just the one, and change io.lines() iterators to yield two results
each time, the line and the new line character(s)
+ Add a new function, a generalised form of io.lines(), something like
io.reader(filename, format) where 'format' is the same kind of thing
as the argument(s) passed to file:read(). If you pass "*l", the
iterator returned is identical to one created by io.lines() (and would
have the same problem); you could instead pass a number or "*a", which
would create an iterator that would not strip the newlines.
Personally I like the third option, as it seems like a more general
solution. Any which way, I think it is worth finding a good solution
in time for the final release of 5.2.
