Re: Lua 5.1 (work6) now available

[David Burgess <dburgess@...>]

I for one think the length operator is a good thing.
The frequency of use justifies the syntactic simplification.

DB

On 5/19/05, Chris Marrin <chris@marrin.com> wrote:
> Adriano Ferreira wrote:
> > Each one of these operators or prefixes (* or #) has its load of
> > meanings in another programming languages. It is difficult to chose
> > which one makes more sense in the context of Lua.
> >
> > For example,
> > * (C/C++)
> >     - dereferencing pointers in expressions
> >     - declaring pointer types in declarations
> > * (Ruby, Python, Perl6)
> >     - syntactic sugar for what Lua unpack does: f(*p) = f(p[0], p[1], ...)
> >       In Perl 6 known as the splat operator
> > # (Smalltalk)
> >     - used as a prefix for Symbols (which are Smalltalk parlance for
> > Lisp/Scheme atoms)
> 
> But why have a primitive operator for this at all? It seems like having
> a library function call to return this information would be sufficient.
> In fact, Lua has such a thing, or more precisely it has two, right? One
> to return the number of contiguous numeric indices and one to return the
> total number of properties. So why the operator? I think adding modulus
> '%' is a good idea because this is such a fundamental operator. But if
> you want to add new operators, then the bitwise operators or '+=', etc.
> would seem like a better choice, wouldn't it?
> 
> --
> chris marrin                ,""$,
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> "As a general rule,don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell"'
>