Re: Lua 4.0 (alpha) now available

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>From: Dave Bollinger <DBollinger@compuserve.com>

>  +  luadebug.h doesn't have single-state macros, is this intentional?

Yes. Debugging is already a delicate task, and people writing debuggers
and similar tools need to know very well what they are doing.
On the other hand, we did provide a conversion file in etc/ldbug.[ch],
which "works" but hasn't been thoroughly tested. If you have code that uses
the old luadebug.h, you may want to try this before converting your code to
the new luadebug.h (which was redesigned to be easier than the old one).
We'd like to hear about the use of ldbug.c and the new luadebug.h.

>  +  You have exposed the name "TObject" in lua.h to define lua_Object. 
>Borland C++ Builder uses "TObject" as the great-grand-daddy class of just
>about everything.

Oops. We'll see what can be done to avoid name clashes. Thanks.

>  ..so am quite happy to finally be able to code "for i=1,n do whatever(i)
>end".  :-)  That covers 90% of what I'd use a for loop for.

That's why we finally added a for. Instead of trying for a super general for,
we settled for a 90% solution :-)

>  +  Had to add lots of const's before char *'s.

Yes, this can be a pain at first, but it's so much safer and clearer that
we thought it A Good Thing (TM).

>  +  Had to fix a Lua-based gc tag method.  It frustrated me at first to
>get that deprecated message, but after being force to rework the code I
>realized that I should have been doing that way even with 3.2.

Thanks for sharing this with us! We expect that some people would have GC tag
methods written in Lua, but we also expect that these same people are somehow
doing "the wrong thing" and would benefit from having to modify their code,
as you discovered yourself. I'm sorry if this sounds patronizing, but we really
think this make Lua much clearer and safer.

Perhaps you could post a summary of what you had been doing with GC tag methods
in case other people are doing similar things.

Thanks for your comments.
--lhf