Re: Lua is about to become history

[ramsdell@... (John D. Ramsdell)]

> From: Bret Victor <bret@ugcs.caltech.edu>
...
> You might want to mention (if it's actually true!) that Lua
> has experienced more backwards-incompatible changes
> than most languages as it evolved, and that its current
> simplicity and elegance owe a lot to having discarded
> cruft as better ideas came along.  You can discuss why
> the Lua userbase is tolerant of backwards-incompatibility:
> that an interpreter is typically embedded into apps, that
> the userbase is relatively small and enthusiastic, etc.

Bret, 

I think you have to be very careful about making this case.  How
tolerant of backwards-incompatibility do you thing the Lua user base
would be if the Lua authors modernized the language to support
zero-based array and string indexing?  The greater difficulty of
writing correct code using one-based array indexing was obvious to all
when Fortran and C were two of the few major languages available, and
the lesson was not lost by the designers of the current popular
languages, such as Python.  But at this stage, do you really think
that wart can be fixed?

John