Re: Lua 5.2 and continue

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:47, pan shizhu <pan.shizhu@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Again — it is so only if you want it. This is not true for the code I
usually work with.

> But in principle they have "everything is a table" philosophy and I think
> they are the same language.

"Everything is a table" is not everything that Lua is (but a good part
of it, I agree).

If someone patched the core language (as apposed to the libraries, to
the sane extent) — I believe, the result would be not Lua, but a
custom dialect of Lua.

This is terminology problem.

>> 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.

You mean the lack of them?

> 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.

Lua is successful enough for me. Part of its success is lack of
"pythonic" bloat.

We surely need a set of "blessed" libraries for all purposes. But,
IMO, they should not get into the core language.

>> 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.

A lot of other features also exist in this form.

> 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.

I understand you, but I disagree. See above.

Alexander.