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On Aug 4, 2005, at 19:29:45, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote: 
That seems nice. A simple scheme would be simply a function call
like   compatmode5_0() or something like that.

Should it control the "whole" compatibility at once or should it
control different issues independently?
(e.g., compatmode5_0("longstrings") would set compatibility only
for long strings/comments...)


Hi,

new here, lurked over the past few days, and very impressed with how smooth Lua works (it compiled out of the box, I just dropped it in a project file! Wow!), just un-lurking to give my $0.02:

I'd suggest not hard-coding this for 5.0. Maybe do something like good old ("classic") MacOS had: A Gestalt() function that takes a selector and returns a value (either a set of flags, or simply a boolean, or whatever seems appropriate). That way you could ask for a particular feature. Older versions that don't know a selector could just return 0. If you want it to be settable, you might want to not call it Gestalt(), though.

Another approach would be to just declare a built-in list that Lua itself defines, and from which you can get/on which you can set certain feature flags. _FEATURES.longstrings = true, or whatever. By not including the version number in the name, you leave the way open for being able to add new features to be queried/set in later releases, and if you decide that a feature that you deprecated for 5.0 should come back in 6.0, you can just keep the option there, even though it's now there for compatibility with 5.0, not 4.0. You could also add some more things to query, like the host OS, or even host- application-specific flags (though you'll want to define a reserved namespace for built-in, Lua-specific stuff).

What do you think?
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de