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

[Vaughan McAlley <ockegheim@...>]

2009/3/11 Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br>
>
> Technical arguments (hexa is tight, can be unambiguous, is good for
> masks and other bit tricks) are wellcome. Non-technical ones ("many
> people support it", "many people expect it", "many other languages have
> it") have no weight.
>

I don't know if it's a technical argument or not, but on the occasions
I have to enter hex data it gets tedious calculating decimal
equivalents for byte after byte. For me it is with MIDI data and
occasionally encoding UTF, which my Mac only gives me in hex.

Lua’s string powerful string matching capabilites (and including \0 as
valid) encourage (or at least allow) the use of the string library on
arbitrary data. The source of literals in these kind of patterns are
frequently in hex form.

Conversion in the parsing stage is preferable because it creates
lighter byte-code, and (with the exception of loadstring) only happens
once.

I’m as close as one would get to being a non-C programmer. I pretty
much have to relearn C every time I try something with it. That’s why
I like and use Lua. But I understood and used hex long before I
learned Lua or tried to learn C.

That said, I concede that the reason Lua is such a good language is
that it’s tightly controlled by three very smart people who are
constantly working to improve it. I fully understand that philosophy.
So if this doesn't make it into the language I'll just keep using my
patch.

Vaughan