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Toyotomi wrote:
I just want state my belief that this and other suggestions to make Lua more inline with one groups conventions are valid, but should not be dwelled upon.
The point isn't to follow some other group's convention, but to solve a problem. My conclusion that there is a problem may be invalid, which is certainly open to discussion.
Exactly because Lua is small and simple, and because it's useful in embedded systems, it frequently gets modified to suit the application. That's useful and should be encouraged. Note that not only are official releases tinkered with, but also work releases, and things can quickly get confusing. What release of Lua is this patch for? How likely is a patch that was for 4.1work to apply cleanly to 5.0work? Users of Lua will have trouble organizing their modifications if there is confusion at the source. (I pointed out an example of the confusion propagating to a downstream package in my last message.)
Back to release methodology in general, another issue to consider is that some Lua developments (full lexical scoping, weak tables) are clearly useful and have been working well in the development releases for some time, while others (global keyword, generators library reorganization) are taking a while to get a handle on. It would be nice if things could occasionally propagate from development to production without waiting until all the stars are correctly aligned. That's more distraction for Lua's small team however, so I can understand why they may not want to do that.
-John -- OpenPGP encrypted mail welcome.