Re: ~= vs. !=

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> Also, the point here is not just "Hey, Lua is like this, learn it.".
> I'm embedding Lua in a few standard softwares which are used by a
> lot of people. It'd be very nice if something as simple as the
> 'not equal' operator was the same they know in every other language
> they have heard of.

This is important, especially for a language like Lua which is often
secondary within a project.

> Ohh.. so the idea is "Let's break scripts in every version"? Perhaps
> I'm using the wrong language then.

Not really. Lua is designed for embedding, embedded apps tend to stick to
one version of the language, so breaking the language with new (major)
versions (as happens with most languages) isn't a problem. I used Lua 4
for an embedded app, and it wouldn't occur to me to switch to Lua 5: I
don't want to rewrite lots of code for an app that is pretty much mature,
and I'm unlikely to be bitten by bugs in Lua 4.0.1 because there aren't
any known. In extremis, I can fix it myself, as the code is open source,
small, and easy to read (compared to most language implementations). This
is a pretty good situation.

Also, compared with Perl and Python (and most of the rest of the
competition) Lua is much less mature. This is reflected by the rate of
development of new major versions over the last few years. Breaking things
between major versions is necessary to improve the language, and
especially to keep it small and elegant.

> Requests will never end. It's up to the maintainers to understand
> what should and shouldn't be done. Saying "let's not change the
> 'not equal' operator because people will want to change something
> else" is unlogical to me.

Quite so.

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/ | Caution Children At Play Drive Slowly (Anon)