RE: Serious Suggestions

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

>> quite serious ones, many of which seemed to receive no notice (or at least
>> comment) from those "in power".
>Don't take that as a sign that they didn't read you.

Yes. We do listen and discuss suggestions made in lua-l in our weekly meetings
(which are not taking place because Roberto is on vacation till next week).

The best way to get our attention (and everyone else's in lua-l) is to provide
a tentative implementation of the proposed changes with some discussion on
the impact of these changes in the code. The wiki is the best place for this
(including longer discussions). For instance, the "yield patch" by Thatcher
Ulrich motivated us to explore and finally include coroutines in Lua 5.0.

On the other hand, sending a large number of suggestions will certainly
overflow our mental buffers. It's best to focus on a few issues at a time.

Finally, tastes differ and not everyone likes the details of Lua, specially
lexical and syntactical details. Some of our decisions on Lua were made purely
on the basis of taste (and some wish to not look like C, see below). For
instance, don't expect Lua to use symbols for "not", "and", and "or"...
Our "history" paper says:

   Moreover, because many potential users of the language were not
   professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax
   (and semantics).

Bottom line: by all means suggest improvements (and implementations!) but
don't expect that we're designing Lua in lua-l.
--lhf