Re: Skipping leading "shebangs" in a file

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> On 8 August 2016 at 05:28, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > The documentation is accurate. It's done by luaL_loadfilex and not
> > part of the more general chunk-loading functionality -- you can't
> > write load("#!/foo\nprint 'hi'") in Lua code and have it work.
> >
> > /s/ Adam
> >
> 
> Would it be safe to do it when I load a file but not when I load a string?
> Would this fit in with how users assume/expect it to work with Lua?

Well, it is safe in the sense that this is how Lua works :-)

Ideally, both the shebang and BOM should be handled by lua.c (the
stand-alone interpreter), not by any library function. But it
is difficult to implement them apart from the rest of loadfile
functionality, so we put them inside 'luaL_loadfilex'.

In particular, we did not document the skipping of BOM because that
sounds like a hack for us. BOMs in ascii or utf-8 documents is a bug,
period. Given that this bug is so prevalent, we decided to handle it,
but it is a kind of "implementation detail". Documenting it would sound
like a recognition that utf-8 BOMs could have some place in a reasonable
world.

-- Roberto