Re: Lua 5.1 (beta) now available

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 11-Nov-05, at 3:54 PM, Mike Pall wrote:

> Ah, ok. So we better leave out the L and specify these macros
> as 'not allowed to throw errors'.

That's quite awkward for the integer division and modulus operators, 
though, and those are not used in any context where L is not available.

I'm not particularly keen on pseudo-NANs. Real NANs are hard enough to 
deal with. In any event, 1/0 is not a NAN, it's +infinity (another 
quantity hard to express with normal integer arithmetic.) So the 
question is, would it be a tragedy if:

  local a = 1/0

produced a compilation error when the compiler runs with integer 
arithmetic.

I don't think it would be. It is true that I have been known to use 1/0 
in actual lua code, but I'd actually be happier to use math.maxnum 
provided that it were really the largest possible number and not just 
some big number. (math.minnum would also be necessary.)