Re: Possible enhancements for Lua 5.2

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

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Luis Carvalho <lexcarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> While we're at it, what happened to the lightweight syntax for functions that
> was discussed in a long thread some time ago [1]?

The anti-feeling was too strong; it was felt that it was getting too
close to the dense symbol-heavy syntax of Perl (or even C). As Dirk
puts it in that post, the Pascal keyword-driven model has served Lua
well; readability is more important than writeability.

> More generally, are
> token-filter hooks being considered in any flavor (at least for future
> versions)?

I used to be a proponent, but stand-alone preprocessing works just as
well (better, in some ways) and doesn't need any core changes. With
MetaLua or LuaMacro, one can have custom lightweight function syntax
in a REPL - exploratory programming is one place where keyword-syntax
can slow you down.

steve d.