Lua and Saint-Exupery?

[PA <petite.abeille@...>]

Hello,

There was a thread back in January of this year about a "roadmap" of 
some sort for Lua... mostly concerned with what to add to the 
language...

As an alternative to creeping featurism, Saint-Exupery was 
appropriately quoted:

"La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais 
quand il ne reste rien à enlever."

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo confessed a fondness for Saint-Exupery's 
approach:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/13153/

Considering all this, here are 3 issues I would like to see addressed 
in Lua at one point or another:

(1) Decay. Some syntactical laxness can only be explained in terms of 
legacy. They should be cleaned up. For instance, there is no apparent 
rational reason to allow print "hello" but not print true. Therefore a 
function call should always require parentheses. No wacky exceptions. 
Keep the ship tight and clean.

(2) Lack of focus. There seems to be an inflation of sugary syntactical 
additions lately. Colons, dots, what not. The latin alphabet provides 
several more punctuation marks, so there is ample scope for things to 
get even more out of hand (perhaps using question mark to test for nil 
values, e.g. aTable?aKey and what not). The tide should be turned back 
to avoid too many schisms in how one can express things in Lua. 
Fragmentation and balkanization of the core syntax is counter 
productive and harmful in the long run. If sugar and convenience is 
what one want, use LuaPlus or such. Therefore the colon notation should 
go the way of the Dodo. Keep the ship tight and clean.

(3) Inconsistency. Lua's core should try to be consistent. For example, 
there is a glaring inconsistency in Lua's core libraries. All of them 
use the dot notation except io. Pointless fashion statement. Keep the 
core internally consistent. Only use one notation. Keep the ship tight 
and clean.

Cheers

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/