Re: Question about using Lua for defining GUIs

["Peter Hill" <corwin@...>]

RLake@oxfam.org.uk:
> Interesting... without looking at the Lua parser or trying anything, my
> hunch is that you're running into a line-end-aware issue introduced with
> Lua 5.

Hmm, I take back the comments I made a few weeks ago about the line-end
aware issue. I think I misunderstood the (admittedly unclear) comment in the
manual. It says:

    "As an exception to the format-free syntax of Lua, you cannot put a line
     break before the ( in a function call. That restriction avoids some
     ambiguities in the language. If you write
           a = f
           (g).x(a)
    Lua would read that as a = f(g).x(a). So, if you want two statements,
    you must add a semi-colon between them. If you actually want to call f,
    you must remove the line break before (g)."


The manual comment is a little confusing. On one hand it says:
    "If you actually want to call f, you must remove the line break before
     (g)"

but on the other it says that for:
    a = f
    (g).x(a)

that:
    "Lua would read that as a = f(g).x(a)"


Having checked the executable it seems that indeed, if you use the ambiguous
syntax, then the compiler will detect it and return that as an error. Ie, it
*does* check the newline (something which would normally be stripped by the
lexical analyser). Not very nice :-(.

*cheers*
Peter Hill.