Re: ~= vs. !=

[Gustavo Niemeyer <niemeyer@...>]

> > It's not a big deal, but I'm curious. Is there any intention of
> > including '!=' as an alternative to '~='? I was even thinking
> > about including that locally myself, but it would be very nice
> > if the standard syntax supported it as well.
> 
> I don't think there is any intention of doing this. You can make the
> change easily, I think its only one character. But, as soon as you do it
> you don't have Lua, you have another language.

Yep.. that's the point. But if I advertise it as another language, Lua
loses. If I make no change in that regard, users are losing since
that's the most usual 'not equal' operator (C, Python, Perl, Ruby,
Shell, etc).

I see no point in not doing such an easy addition.

> Lua is not C!

Oh, thank you. I wasn't aware about this. :-)

> IMHO if it was to be changed "~=" should be abandoned and all code
> changed over to "!=". Having two optional forms of ~= would be silly. 

Breaking compatibility with older scripts would be even sillier.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net