Re: From: Norman Ramsey Re: Switch/Case statements revisited

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > |>   * While I love Haskell/OCaml matching with pattern guards, I don't
 > |>     see that as a good model for Lua, because Lua has no notion of
 > |>     constant or constructor
 > 
 > It`s no true. `Nil`, `false` , `true`, 0.0, 1.0 ... {}, functions is a
 > constant.

Sorry, what I should have said to be precise is that the Lua grammar
does not include a syntactic category of constant.  The major
syntactic categories in Lua are 'stat' and 'exp', and introducing a
new one would be a significant addition to the cognitive complexity of
the grammar.

In other words, right now you can explain Lua to newbies by saying
``look, a Lua program is just a sequence of statements, and while
there are many different ways to form statements, the only potentially
complicated part of a statement is an expression, and the same kinds
of expressions are used everywhere.''

 > Icon:

My Icon books are in storage and I better not try to reconstruct from
memory.  There's a manual on the U of Arizona web site.



N