Re: "Ignore me" symbol

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 17/12/2018 06:35, Coda Highland wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 1:50 PM Egor Skriptunoff
> <egor.skriptunoff@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > What do you think about the following suggestion?
> >
> > Let's introduce special "ignore me" symbol in Lua syntax.
> > (The description below assumes this symbol is the backtick)
>
> I disagree with introducing special meaning to consecutive such
> symbols. If they're supposed to be "ignore me" symbols then they
> should be, y'know, ignored. Which means the second one should be
> ignored the same as the first one.
>
> As other posters have mentioned, it also makes a mess when you start
> combining the various kinds, and while it's true that you just
> "shouldn't do that" it also seems like something designed to improve
> readability shouldn't be a tool to make it worse. We have line and
> block comments for that, despite your assertion that you don't intend
> it to be used that way.
>
> If we want an annotation syntax, then we should ask for an annotation
> syntax, and ideally it should resemble something that people already
> recognize as an annotation syntax.
>
> /s/ Adam

I largely agree with you.

There are two orthogonal problems here that are addressed which should 
be kept separated, IMO.

Annotations: although I don't feel the urge to have that feature in Lua, 
probably it would be handy, especially if Lua provided a standard mean 
to process them without additional tools.

Numeric optional separator: I crave this, together with a standard 
syntax for binary literals[1] . C++ addressed both needs with the syntax:

0b1011'1100'0001

I'd prefer the underscore as a separator, though:

0b1011_1100_0001


Cheers!

-- Lorenzo

[1] Yes, I know I could define something like this:

B'1100 1010'

but it wouldn't be standard, it will require runtime execution and it's 
extremely memory-wasteful (think of initialization of MCU code, for 
example).