Old subject, new discussion, same conclusion

[Diego Nehab <diego@...>]

Hi,

I have been using Lua for quite a long time now (around 5 years),
writing applications, extention libraries and whatever it comes to my
mind when TV is not interesting enough. One of the things that have
*not* bothered me since then is the way local and global declarations
work.

Of course, when you start using a new language, you might get confused
when you find something different from what you have been used too. But
those are things that will always happen, unless all the languages are
made the same.

When I came from Turbo Pascal to C, I hated not being able to run
initialization code automatically for each library I created. After a
while, I got used to the lib_open()/lib_close() paradigm. It works, and
C has so many other nice features that this can not be considered a
problem: it's only a particularity of the language. Do you think we
should try to change ANSI C because of that?

As you might have noticed from the archives, the Lua development team
(of which I am *not* part) is _not_ interested in making the language
more complicated and general by including lot's of new features.
Instead, they have been constantly improving what the language has to
offer. "Simple is beautiful" is one of the quotes I hear a lot from
these people, and for what I can see in Lua, they are probably right. If
only M$ followed the same philosophy...

I hope you guys agree that behaving like it does, Lua is very nice for a
variety of applications. And I hope too you get used to it, and enjoy
using it. I really don't think it will change for now. After all, it is
easier to change one's way of programming than changing a programming
language.

By the way, Phyton is weird! (no flames, please, this was a joke).

Cheers,
Diego.