Re: Lua 5.2 and continue

[pan shizhu <pan.shizhu@...>]

> If we start to add defines on language feature basis, Lua would cease
> to exist as one language, and would become a blurred set of dialects.

Each games have differnent libraries and all Luas are different. But
in principle they have "everything is a table" philosophy and I think
they are the same language.

> I believe this would really hurt the language. Even now it is still
> barely possible to find good 3rd party Lua library (in broad sense)
> for a given task. It would be impossible with this change.

IMO it is the 3rd party libraries who hurt the language.

Look at python, that most libraries are accepted by official
distribution, so we always have the standard implementation of many
features. If we stripped off everything, and make most python
libraries as 3rd-party library, python would not become so sucessful.


> You need fancy feature, not in core language and you can't talk Lua
> Team into implementing it?

It is different from "need fancy feature". The implementation of
"continue" is already there, but it is not in the official release.

I think it would be better to include it in official release, even if
we must define compile-time argument to enable the "feature", a
disabled-by-default feature is much better than a 3rd-party-patch.