Re: What's up with token filters (Re: New operators?)

[Olivier Galibert <galibert@...>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 03:27:17PM +0200, Olivier Delannoy wrote:
> Lua should not evolve in a way that makes the language more complex
> and not clear for the sake of not writing a few more extra characters.
> Lua is small and should stay small. 1 more vote against += -= *= /= --
> ++ and all other operator added to the language for programmer
> lazyness. If one want all this operation its another language and it
> can go with one providing this kind of facility.

Oh please.  Read the thread you're replying to, if += and ++ were
*only* syntaxic sugar it wouldn't be a problem to add them.  It's
because they imply way more than that that there are issues.

For those who stumble on this post, some of the real reasons are:
- in lua assignation is a statement, not an expression, and people who
  want ++/-- want to use it as an expression.  Assignation-as-expression
  carries a lot of complexity for the programmer/maintainer a
  non-professional-programmer language lika lua would rather avoid.

- lua's multi-assignation does not interact very well with += and friends

- all these operators have in-place modification and atomicity semantics
  that do not go very well with lua either.  ':' is already more complex
  in that area than one would think at first glance.

As usual, power and complexity go hand in hand, and in that case the
complexity rise is too high.

  OG.