Re: Features you would like to see

[Duck <duck@...>]

Are these features? Not really -- just implementation and build-time 
tweaks to bring Lua into the 21st century..

1. A compile-time directive to select support for 64-bit (or at least 
52-bit/53-bit) file offsets in the IO library.

2. Compile-time (or even run-time!) support for choosing 8-bit, 16-bit or 
32-bit "chars" as the basis of strings.

3. Standardised compile-time selection of a floating point "number" type 
with more than 64 bits of integer precision.

And as David B said, I think that Lua needs standardised, albeit optional, 
libs for sockets (the core C component of LuaSocket would be an ideal 
candidate here) and for some sort of pre-emptive multithreading 
(LuaThreads would be an ideal candidate here).

Whichever libs are chosen for the above, they should be capable of being 
built as shared libraries, or built in, without source modification.

The reason for focusing on sockets and threads are that these are fairly 
well-known and commonly-used mechanisms for IPC and for parallel 
multiprogramming, both of which are impossible with standard Lua 
components right now.

This is not quite the same as having this sort of library available 
somewhere on the Wiki or the Forge. We're talking about official 
"auxiliary auxiliary" libraries, part of the standard Lua source distro 
for those who wish to use them.

The stuff about nils in tables (fixable with Lua code), changes in 
repeat-until, and other such stuff, is small beer in comparison, though I 
do endorse:

4. Compile-time directive to require globals to be defined as globals 
(don't care whether there's a global keyword or not) before use, and not 
allowing them to burst into life due to a typo :-)