Re: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)

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

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 2:44 PM, David Demelier <demelier.david@gmail.com> wrote:
> While Lua is completely free and open source, I don't like much the closed
> development model it uses.

This is a strength, IMHO.  If Lua was a democracy, it would rapidly
cease to be Lua, because many new features would be adopted that don't
necessarily agree with each other - there's a danger of 'conceptual
mess'.  It would quickly put on the kilograms, as well.

I do agree that it would be easy to make != a synonym for ~= (if only
because it's easier to type on most layouts) and 'continue' is easy to
understand. (I don't mind typing 'goto continue' as Dirk suggests -
i.e. autogenerated continue labels at loop ends).

But these don't feel like major hassles, compared to the problem of
"what else?" What else is so convenient to embed in larger programs?

If you are an _embedder_, then you can always make little tweaks to
the syntax (!= would be very easy). But then you carry the extra
burden of documentation for your dialect.

It's always sad when someone leaves the community...

steve d.