Re: Making Lua lexically scoped (was: Re: Proper tail recursion)

["Jay Carlson" <nop@...>]

David Jeske writes:

> I would be far happier if I had a mechanism for making my class system
> have more bearable syntax. However, I recognize the likely-hood of Lua
> ending up with the meta-syntax mechanisms that I think would go so
> well with it's meta-language mechanisms is about zero. :)

What does your class system look like?  What help do you need from the
syntax?  Do you need reader macros, or can you get away with runtime
interpretation?

I've seen some places where it would be nice to have symbol-like strings,
strings with a surface syntax that makes them look like identifiers.  Like
:foo or foo: or something like that, sugar for "foo".  Except those break
the grammar in Lua, and I can't think of any nice looking alternatives.  I
suppose they don't have to be strings; easy enough to make them opaque.  But
so far I've managed to live without them, and I'm not sure I see the
advantage of adding a one-off feature relative to the complexity costs.

Jay