On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 2:41 AM, Jay Carlson
<nop@nop.com> wrote:
I don't think anybody's been talking about a functional programming style.
Fair enough. However, I believe that if you introduce terse and tempting lambdas in the language, then you're going to entice people into writing bad functional-ish code. One of Lua's goal is to be beginner-friendly; it doesn't only mean its grammar must be easy to grasp, it also means it shouldn't tempt beginners into writing unnecessarily awful code.
There are advanced stuff in Lua (metatables, coroutines, first class environments etc.), but it's very natural to write code without even knowing about them, and they aren't tempting at all to beginners. If you introduce lambdas, you'll want to expose them to casual users.
Given you went to the trouble of building the pattern match syntax, you should consider how verbose anything like it would be in base Lua.
I wouldn't call the result "beginner-friendly", and I certainly wouldn't advocate back-porting it into plain Lua :) I realize that delayed execution is a desirable feature, and if there's a beginner-friendly way to introduce it in the language, I'm all for it. But I'm afraid that terse lambdas would have unintended side effects in many hands.
PS: Thunks, in an imperative context, are probably more akin to continuations than to lambdas; but I don't know what to make out of this remark.
