Re: Idea. Removing nils from the language.

[Mike Nelson <mikestar1313@...>]

On 1/10/2015 9:09 AM, Enrique Arizón Benito wrote:


(various statements about 'nil' I will not quote)


My take on what Enrique is saying is not that he objects to the 
existence of the Lua value nil as such, but to the implicit 
initialization of variables to nil when no other value is specified.
Then what is being asked for is to require all variables to be 
explicitly initialized (even to nil, if the programmer explicitly codes 
the intention to do so).

So,
    local x
    do_something() -- function which may use x

would no longer be legal Lua code, but

    local x=nil
   do_something() -- function which may use x

will continue to be legal.

This is a change I would have supported if we were hashing out the 
specifications for Lua 1.0, but version 5.3 is much too late to make 
such a severely breaking change, IMHO.

Enrique, is my understanding of what you are saying anything like what 
you are trying to say?

-- Mike Nelson