Re: [proposal] Libary changes

[Sebastien Lai <237482@...>]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 5:59 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yes. it is overwritten inside the loop.
> You'll have to quote the actual code to make me believe that.  Look here:
You're missing the part where I said "inside the loop".


>  1. There is no reason not to do it.
>  2. It's done that way in Language X.
The block syntax of Lua already existed in Algol.
The pattern matching feature of FSharp already existed in SML.
The regular expression literals in Ruby already existed in Perl.
The "indention" syntax in Haskell already existed in Python.
The class templates in D already existed in C++.

... In case you're not able to catch my drift here, let me summarize
it this way: There have always been languages who copied
programmingstyles / language features from other languages. Lua is no
different in this regard. And putting it like it's a bad thing is,
sorry to put it so directly, a stupid thing to do.


> And the one that persuades me most to treat it seriously, is:
>  I've made a careful study of the article "The Evolution of Lua" by
> Roberto, Luiz and
> Waldemar, and this suggestion is in line with how Lua has been evolving.
>
Since I assume that you __did__ read it, I suppose you also know how
most of current functions in the 'string' table used to be global? For
example, 'strlen', instead of string.len.
Quite honestly, this proposal is *exactly* in line with the way Lua
has been evolving the past years.

> So, when you mentioned pack becoming table.pack
You must be confusing me with someone else. I didn't mention
table.pack. Apart from not being me who said that, I do agree that
moving "unpack", "*get" and friends into the "table" table is an
excellent idea.

Remember that there was a time where "tables" were named "tags", and
the API change from 4* to 5* did naturally make many existing scripts
incompatible.