Re: Feature proposal: \x## notation in strings

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2009/3/10 Benjamin Tolputt et al. wopte:
> Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
>> Not exactly a "united" feature, as each language seems to present
>> a slightly different mechanism for hexadecimal characters:
>>
>>   * "\x7": ok in Perl and C, error in Python ("invalid \x escape").
>>   * "\x445": ok in Perl and Python (meaning "D5"), undefined
>>     behavior in C. (ISO says it is an error, my gcc gives a warning
>>     and uses the value "E".)
>>
>
> With all due respect, I feel you are deliberately missing the point.
> That point being, that all of those languages provide a hexadecimal
> escape sequence for programmers to use (and in your examples even
> through the common '\x' escape). It would also seem somewhat unanimous
> from the users on the list that this is a desired feature (with several
> having expressed surprise that it doesn't provide it).

I usually don't react when I see feature proposal that I don't like
(that is most of them), because I trust authors to keep Lua small. But
when people call that unanimous I have to break the unanimity. I vote
against that proposal, because it's not very useful and it can be
added very easily in "user space" with a simple gsub and a one
character prefix, or for free with a token filter or any other syntax
enhancing library.

> I understand the whole "benevolent dictator" thing, but it is seems
> pretty obvious that for a measly ten lines or so of code that it would
> be immensely appreciated & used.

Ten lines for you, ten lines for me, and we get a multi-million line
bloatware. No thanks.

Most language have it ? Lua has a niche to fill, ie. small
interpreters with very limited requirements (in terms of compiler
features, C lib features, memory and CPU), and adding useless code
(that has several possible non-core implementations) will move Lua
away from this niche.

Many Lua programmers come from C ? Many Lua "programmers" are not
professionnal programmers, do not care about hexadecimal, and have
never read (and will never read) a line of C.