Re: Propsoal: a lua dialect without nil

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
>    -- nil is confusing, replace it by something else
>    -- implicit conversion is evil, get rid of it
>    -- table as only data stucture is inadequate, let's have some more
>    -- index origin 1 is silly, it should be 0

Part of it is the  'Why can't Lua be like X' theme, where X is some
language du jour.  Some of it comes from the old idea that humans
cannot be trusted, which is very strong in the design of Java. (And
Java is considered pretty lax by the real strong-typing enthusiasts)

Such discussions can be intellectually stimulating or plain
bikeshedding (like the old men in the pub) depending on the maturity
of the participants ;)  They help refine our thinking.

As long as they don't annoy people, it's fine. We still have plenty of
bandwidth for the important stuff - for instance, it's going to be a
good year for Lua and numerics.

My personal roadmap is going to shift more towards environments and
editors, the tooling aspect of the ecosystem which is so important for
productivity with larger applications; David M's LuaInspect is a very
promising way forward, pushing static analysis beyond what we might
naively think is possible with a dynamic language.

steve d.