Re: More on environments and objects

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

Good list.

On 27-Aug-05, at 9:36 AM, Mike Pall wrote:

> My personal there's-got-to-be-a-better-way list for Lua
> is pretty short nowadays (thanks to Lua 5.1):
>
> - Yield from everywhere.

I'm starting to think that yield is hiding an ambiguity. The fact that 
you cannot use yield to both implement control-inversion and 
thread-scheduling independently makes me wonder if there isn't some 
better way.

> - Explicit finalization.

Agreed.

> - Standardized module installation.

Agreed.

> - Userdata type checks.

I think this can be accomplished easily now that userdata have both 
"class" and "instance" tables, although I think the mechanism could be 
improved slightly.

> - Better Lua/C API (something for 6.x).

It would have to be even simpler than the current one, which is a 
challenge.

> And a few minor issues with out-of-the-box behaviour:
>
> - Hex numbers (parser + luaO_str2d with strtol fallback for non-C99)

Agreed.

> - Missing bit operations (math.*)

I'd put bit operations in string.*, not math.*. We can argue about this 
after 5.1 comes out.

> - xpcall()
> - package.cpath (as of 51w6)
> - Makefile (OS detection, -ldl or not, creating module dirs etc.)
> - lua_Number (support for types other than double)

Agreed with all the above.