Re: setfenv/getfenv

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

This story reminds me of the account John Warnock gives of the origins of PDF in which he redefined the base graphics operators in PostScript to capture the print stream rather than render to the page buffer.

Mark

On Jan 12, 2010, at 12:17 PM, Eike Decker wrote:

> Here's a personal story of mine where setfenv / getfenv saved my day.
> 
> A friend and I wrote this 3d game engine and we had to do a
> presentation on a university project that we worked on for about 5
> months - it's been an 3d world map editor for simulating town traffic.
> The editor and the world loader (and a lot of other code) was written
> in Lua (by us alone).
> When preparing the presentation, I was torn between making a simple
> powerpoint presentation or integrating a presentation into our 3d
> engine.
> What I finally did was, that I wrote a presentation software for the
> 3d engine very quickly (half an afternoon) that was able to show text
> and pictures - so it was for me as good as powerpoint, so if my plan
> would backfire, I could just go with screenshots instead of what my
> plan was. Then I loaded the code of the editor (or parts of), and
> faked all the required stuff through clever usage of function
> environments. It worked like a charm and I went ahead. It hardly took
> any time to do that.
> The final result was quite impressive - as an opener it looked like
> power point, but when I started on certain pages of the presentation
> to rotate the view, inserting new objects or cars that would drive
> around in the scenery that I built for the presentation, everyone was
> surprised as noone would have expected that.
> 
> And it did not require me to rewrite the editor's source code - it was
> just a few lines of code that made the job. I could even reload the
> editor's sourcecode to do debugging in my presentation...
> I have worked with OO and other stuff before that, but this kind of
> flexibility, the ability to fake environments, that is in my opinion
> an unmatched and extremely powerful feature of Lua. Of course - you
> need to understand fully what you do and of course, if you apply it,
> do it with great care. At best, don't use it at all, but it's good to
> know it's there.
> We used function environments later on in a few places where it was
> important to sandbox the environment (running tutorial code for
> example that needed to fit into a tutorial presentation framework) and
> track what one's code does - without modifying the original code of
> it.
> 
> Removing this functionality from Lua is in my opinion a step backward.
> The purpose of this change seems to be to help "normal" people not to
> be confused by the presence of two functions, but effectively, the
> lack of this functionality is an ugly hindrance for clever people who
> know what they are doing.
> 
> I really like Lua, but I was disappointed to see this change (without
> a proper replacement). The 'in ... do ... end' syntax is a nice thing
> - but in my opinion it doesn't fill the gap at all.
>