Re: [CFD] Local functions for Lua 4.1

[Edgar Toernig <froese@...>]

John Belmonte wrote:
> 
> A slippery slope, this proper lexical scoping...

Yeah.  But I think one only has to get used to it.

> It's a sound proposal, but what about backwards compatibility?

There are already so much changes in the 4.1 snapshots that _I_
would call the final version 5.0.

> How much code is out there doing "function x()" at the top scope
> and expecting to generate a global?

I'm not really sure that there are so many that expect a global.
Most of them just expect that they may access the function from
any scope and that will still be the case most of the time.

The exception are files intended to be dofile'd that provide globals.
I think people writing these "modules" would even prefer a simpler
seperation between different files.

And then there's always the choice to stay with Lua 4.0 if large
part of your application is already written in 4.0 ;-)

> Someday it would nice to have a mechanism for gradually introducing
> incompatibilities like Python's "__future__" module

I'm not sure how this is supposed to work with syntactical or semantic
changes.

Ciao, ET.