Re: Suggestion: no more proposals, only suggestions

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

> On Sep 28, 2015, at 8:07 AM, Tim Perkins <tprk77@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've been thinking the same thing. We're constantly reading pointless proposals on this list. It's getting really old. Kind of hard to enforce though...
> 
> (How many proposals actually become features? I'm betting on zero.)
> 

Hmm well now, I can think of several occasions when suggestions/proposals (call them what you want) have indeed been incorporated, though these are usually more modest changes (API tweaks, doc changes etc). What I’ve noticed, however, is that sometimes a “proposal” is voted down (sometimes quite forcefully) but some time later appears (perhaps in mutated form) in a new Lua release.

Over a year ago I pointed out how hard it was to work backwards from a Lua state pointer to a “wrapper” structure when Lua called out to a C function (especially when the call came from a coroutine). I suggested a user-definable pointer in a lua_State, which was pretty widely shot down (several alternates were suggested, but I felt most were far less efficient than a pointer). And then out comes Lua 5.3 and has pretty much this exact feature (which I now use to great effect in a couple of projects).

The fact is, proposals/suggestions are indicative of some underlying perceived problem of the OP. Sometimes the OP might simply not have analyzed the problem correctly, sometimes the problem may be valid, but there already exists a clean solution unknown to the OP. Sometimes not. But in all cases the post indicates *something* useful imho, even if just indicating something that needs clarification in the documentation.

I personally welcome any and all posts here .. to paraphrase an aphorism “There is no such thing as a bad post, only a bad reply”. Others may of course disagree.

—Tim