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

[Benjamin Tolputt <btolputt@...>]

Jerome Vuarand wrote:
> 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.
>   

Well, I did say "somewhat unanimous". There was a qualifier there and
you have to admit that nearly all list members mailing about this
feature have been fully in support of it.

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

Ah, but this is not "ten lines for you, ten lines for me". This is "ten
lines for all of the people expressing support for the feature".
Hexadecimal characters are a well-known & oft-used escape sequence in
many (most) procedural languages (a paradigm tag Lua shares). This is
not a whacky feature someone thought up for their own use; it is
something that many users have expressed surprise in __not__ being
available in Lua.

Also, as has been pointed out by others. If hexadecimal characters are
an oddity & code bloat, the less ubiquitous "decimal character" escape
is too and should be removed. Decimal escape sequences are more an
oddity than hexadecimal ones.

> 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.

Many Lua programmers are not professional programmers and do not care
about coroutines/operator-overloading/etc and have never used (+ will
never use) them. Should we remove them too? Seriously, this is a really
bad argument.

-- 
Regards,

Benjamin Tolputt
Analyst Programmer