RE: The ~

[Dave Bollinger <DBollinger@...>]

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
 >> periodic meetings in which we mostly discuss what to *remove* from Lua 

   I remember hearing the rumor that a future version of Lua was planned to
have a macro capability.  This is good news, however...  I hope that it
doesn't introduce a bunch of new "punctuation" into the language (witness
Perl, or worse Forth).  I'm suspecting that you might be planning something
similar to the CGILua pre-parse macros, which although functional is not
the most elegant code structure to my eyes.  Others may disagree, but I
prefer words to symbols where reasonable (obviously operators, string
delimiters and the like are good places for symbols).  Then let the
language figure out whether that word is a function/macro/variable/keyword.
 Just hoping that Lua doesn't end up with something unsightly that then
becomes hard to change later.  But I _would_ like to see a powerful macro
facility in Lua.
   It may not be feasible but if it were legal to do something like:

  #define  !=  ~=

   then that would put a rest to this issue, wouldn't it?  Also, if the
macro syntax could handle for loops and case statements then that would put
and end to those issues as well.  Plus probably several other issues I'm
forgetting about, yes?

   Cheers,

   Dave