Re: Are parenthesis-free calls a Good?

[Miles Bader <miles.bader@...>]

"Brandon Van Every" <bvanevery@gmail.com> writes:
> In the few weeks I've been lurking on this mailing list, my impression
> is that everyone and their mother's uncle has got some patch they want
> to submit to the language.  ... This is great from an experimental
> roll-your-own language toolkit standpoint, but for someone searching
> for a standardized language, it doesn't leave a good impression.  It
> makes the language look more like a playground in ferment.

I suspect you need to lurk a bit longer, because you've apparently
managed to gain an almost absurdly wrong-headed impression of Lua
development.  "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...."

More helpfully:

The core Lua developers are very, very, conservative, and the language
only changes very slowly.

There is a grand tradition on this mailing list of constantly proposing
all manner of new features and improvements, but extremely few of these
ever make it into the core language (and those that do tend to be the
most conservative incremental improvements, not the "wacky new language
construct of the week" types).

In those rare cases where the core developers _do_ consider some change,
it's pretty clear that backward compatibility is a primary concern.

-Miles

-- 
The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the
living tissue of the city.  Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable;
moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands
of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.
[James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960]