Re: help to (slightly) modify Lua interpreter

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Francesco Abbate
<francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:
> thank you very much for your suggestion. Actually I've got exactly the
> same idea this morning, that's not bad, may be I'm going to adopt it.

I wonder about all the little tables created by A[{i,j}] ? Would it
hurt indexing much? Only one way to find out!

> Otherwise, if I understand well, everyone here is saying loudly:
> you don't need to change Lua, please keep your dirty hands away from it!!

People here are actually relatively relaxed about modifying Lua syntax
[1], but VM compatibility is important. (OK, that issue is now a bit
confused by LuaJIT 2)  However, modding via token filters or Metalua
_is_ easier than fooling with the parser.

> For the latter remark, this is already the case as I've adopted the
> LNUM patch to support complex numbers and the Metalua notation for
> direct, expression-based, functions (like |x,y| x+2*y).

Well, strictly speaking you have a subset, which will not break any
normal Lua.  The |x,y| patch is definitely something that mainline Lua
could do with, since it fits with the philosophy of simple,
well-understood syntactical sugar and makes the functional style less
'noisy'.

steve d.

[1] Compared to (say) C++.  That is only done by committees that sit
for decades ;)