do you use the pre-processor?

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

Continuing our quest for simplifying Lua, we are considering trimming the
pre-processor.

More precisely, we'd keep $debug, $nodebug, $endinput, but would remove
$if, $else, $end. So, the pre-processor would be back to its old self of
simply a set of pragmas that have immediate effect.

Conditional parts add complexity to the lexer (and the language; see a recent
message about $ inside [[...]] strings), but the benefits are not obvious.
For instance, $if VAR has a misleading requirement that VAR needs to be defined
(or not) *before* the chunk starts.

So, would the removal of $if, $else, $end break lots of existing code?
--lhf