Re: sunday afternoon whishlist

[HyperHacker <hyperhacker@...>]

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 16:33, Henk Boom <henk@henk.ca> wrote:
> On 9 May 2010 11:36, Klaus Ripke <paul-lua@malete.org> wrote:
>>
>> Could indexing anything but a table, or at least indexing nil,
>> return nil instead of throwing an error?
>> I don't see why x.z conveniently gives nil, if there is no z in x,
>> but x.y.z requires an extra check for x.y .
>> This makes working with structures with lots of optional parts pretty
>> tedious - and if it's external input, basically everything is optional.
>>
>> Really I'd love to see nil behave like an empty value of
>> the expected type most of the time, Perl style.
>
> I have to say that nil.abc (and nil(abc), and nil + 1) throwing an error is
> how many of my bugs are caught.
>     henk

Thus why I say it should probably print some type of warning. It's not
something that should be relied on, but the program shouldn't crash
just because Config.Foo.Bar.Something doesn't  exist in the file, and
checking for it beforehand adds a heck of a lot of code and
complexity.

-- 
Sent from my toaster.