Re: [ANN] Underscore.lua 0.3

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

First of all, apologies to Marcus for the inevitable lua-l topic
hijack. We hope to resume normal business soon ;)

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 10:50 AM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> For an interactive shell like the GSL shell, shortcuts are certainly a
> life saver.  You want as many of them as possible.  No objection.  For
> writing programs, things are different, because programs are not
> write-only.  You read them much more often than you write them.

Fair enough, and well argued.  The initial argument _was_ typeability,
but then became one of readability in the case where the payload of
the anonymous function was much smaller than the syntax overhead.

These little 'string lambdas' are most definitely not closures by
their nature, just shorthand. Convenient and short, yes, I suppose the
question is whether they are self-evidently clear enough to justify
their use.

Oh, and +1 for a syntax extension API that doesn't require patching.
It is a bugger for the package maintainers to track patched versions.

steve d.