Re: Bitflags

[Eric Tetz <erictetz@...>]

> Scripters shouldn't have to worry about bits or bitfields

True in theory. In practice, the scripting language will always be called upon to do more than you
originally intended. :)

Having no bitwise operators is a pretty big omission, IMHO. It makes it impossible to manipulate
binary data, which is tragic because Lua's strings are so binary friendly. And it's something that
pretty much every other scripting/configuration language includes (Perl, Tcl, Python, JavaScript,
Ruby, Lisp, etc). Bitlib demonstrates how trivial the actual code is. Adding proper infix
operators is a little more expensive in terms of code size, but it's not significant (is it?).
It's such a seemingly simple addition, yet adds a great deal of power to the language - which I
think is very much in keeping with the Lua spirit. Seems to me, the only hard part is deciding
what operators to use.

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