Re: do you use the pre-processor?

[rw20@...]

> Sounds good to me!

There's always the fact that you don't have to use all language features 
but when a feature is missing then it's harder.  There is a serious need 
for some way to turn on and off chunks of code (mainly for debugging, so 
one switch would mostly solve the problem) which are scattered through 
the source and across multiple files.  If $if is removed and nothing is 
added to replace it then we'll have lots of people (like me) writing 
preprocessors in lua to put something like it back.  The downside to that 
is that then less code is standard lua.  Perhaps a standard extendable 
preprocessor layer is the real solution.  Then as long as you can save 
the preprocessor state, change it, process your file, and restore the 
last state code become portable again. 

> Actually I would like to get rid of $debug and $nodebug also. Reason: Doing
> debug has more to do with the environment than the source, so I would
> prefeer to be able to set debug information in the environment. Also when
> working with multiple sources it gets wierd to keep track of $debug in
> strange places.

This is a good point.  Of course sometimes one global setting is too 
corse grained, for instance you might have a largish game scripted in Lua 
and need to debug certain parts of the code, but if you turn all the 
debuggin on then it isn't fast enough to really test.

Russ