Re: Lua 5.0 and globals (long)

["Peter Shook" <pshook@...>]

On Saturday 01 March 2003 22:52, Peter Hill wrote:
> Sigh. Now THAT is going to be a long and torturous trip :-(.
> A search for "globals" found 574 pages. A summary of the final
> conclusions
> would be nice.

Please, go back and read the list.  You don't have to read all the
questions, just read the responses by the three authors and some
of the other old timers.
Just before the time of release 4.0 is a good place to start.

  http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-l-archive.gz

It's good to have a fresh pair of eyes look things over and question
things, but please don't suggest changing things without considering
the history behind it.  Otherwise we may end up going in circles.


Some people wanted variables to be local by default.  Probably due to
over exposure to PHP and TCL.  Others thought it would be good for Lua
to have better facilities for programming in the large.  It was thought
that declaring globals might solve both of these issues.

Lua almost had a "global" statement that sort of worked like a Pascal
"with" statement, but one little asterix spooked a lot of people,
and it was canned because it was too complicated.

Now we have a compromise that should have made the PHP and TCL people
happy but we haven't heard them say anything about it. 
Unfortunately this has made another camp unhappy, but I think
this is mostly due to coroutines being new and experimental.

I'm sure our three musketeers will save the day in a future episode.
You just have to keep watching.

- Peter Shook

P.S.  Don't believe anything I say, I've lost my mind from working 8
      days a week.