Re: Syntactic sugar for sets

["John Hind" <john.hind@...>]

Asko Kauppi said:
<<
With the same reasons, there's bound to be an avalanche of "within the
spirit of Lua" suggestions.
>>

And I find it very frustrating that every time someone suggests an
improvement to the language the response is loads of elaborate schemes for
doing it within the existing language or through patching and extending
frameworks that have learning curves way out of proportion to the achievable
gains. I would not mind if it *also* got taken seriously as an improvement
to the language, and of course 'taking it seriously' includes rejecting it
(with reasons). It seems that such suggestions just sit in the archives to
be re-discovered by someone else a few years down the line.

Making languages successful in the real world is all about the law of
association, about critical mass. There's a reason why we're all speaking
English here! If you fragment a language into lots of little sub-dialects it
will never achieve that mass and will be overtaken by other, probably
inferior, languages. Of course I could use Lua as a toolkit and make a
language that worked exactly like I wanted, but for a language to be useful,
other people need to speak it too!

And of course you could strip all the syntax sugar out of Lua, but then it
would be a very inexpressive and limited language of interest only to
academics.

- John