Re: state of the Lua nation on resource cleanup

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

If Lua is going to shy away from introducing an explicit finalization  
mechanism, how about introducing better mechanisms for manipulating  
function environments (which would better support John's scope system  
in Lua Gems)?

Vaguely:

1. There needs to be a way to replace the environment on a function  
and get a new function. This would be useful in a variety of contexts.  
But examples like John's which save and restore the environment seem  
fraught with danger. (I've also wanted this capability when designing  
object systems and thinking about how to define "super").

2. It would be nice to have a way to call a function with a particular  
environment even if that function has a protected environment.  
Something like:

	call_with_environment( environment, nesting, fn, ... )

This does not change the actual environment on fn. It merely changes  
the environment used in the call. If nesting is true, then we want to  
construct an environment that uses the supplied environment and then  
chains to the actual environment. (Definition of chaining TBD.)

Mark