Re: Thoughts on optional commas

[Eric Wing <ewmailing@...>]

As a counterweight to your DSL example, I recall CMake
disliking/rejecting Lua because commas would suddenly be required.



On 3/6/12, Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:
> On 04/03/2012 0.59, Greg wrote:
>>> Feel free to create a patch and use it yourself, but don't expect a lot
>>> of people to support losing such a core feature. Even if you never say:
>>>
>>> foo "bar"
>>>
>>> or
>>>
>>> foo{ bar=1 }
>>
>>
>> I agree that this is pretty nice.  It don't use it nearly as often as I
>> use
>> commas.  My average Lua file has over 200 commas and not many instances of
>> foo{
>> bar=1}.   I usually only this with require statements.  Ex: require
>> "utils"
>>
>> - Greg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> I've almost got lost in the thread, but it seems no one has mentioned
> DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).
>
> Lua is awesome in this respect. Without being able to omit parentheses
> in the case of a single string/table, any Lua-based DSL would look much
> clumsier. Compare:
>
>
> BeginSection [[news]]
>    Link "C-programming" {href = "etc.", title = "a book on C"}
>    Link "I love Lua" {href = "etc.", title = "an essay"}
> EndSection()
>
> which is legal Lua syntax now, would become fairly ugly with mandatory
> parentheses!
>
> I wouldn't really forfeit this ability in exchange for the "optional
> comma": too big a loss for little reward IMO.
>
> Cheers.
> -- Lorenzo
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Beginning iPhone Games Development
http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/