Re: [ANN] Lua 5.2.0 (work3) now available

[Duncan Cross <duncan.cross@...>]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
<lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> Lua 5.2.0 (work3) is now available at
>        http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.2.0-work3.tar.gz
>
> MD5     fa529ad323d261f27c12b04e3fef96a7  -
> SHA1    5065a02a373500f62c7b87a89e5574d63dfa53e9  -
>
> This is a work version. All details may change in the final version.
>
> Here are the main changes since the previous work version:
> - new _ENV proposal
> - generational collector (very experimental)
> - light C functions
> - order tag methods follow the same rules of other binary operators
> - lua_absindex
> - \0 in patterns
> - empty statement
> - options in io.lines
>
> The manual has been updated and most glitches reported in work2 have been fixed.
> The complete diffs are available at
>        http://www.lua.org/work/diffs-lua-5.2.0-work2-work3.txt
>
> (This is a very large diff because the manual has been rearranged.)
>
> All work versions are available at
>        http://www.lua.org/work/
>
> All feedback welcome. Thanks.
> --lhf
>
>

Following on from what Roberto said a few weeks ago about a change in
attitude towards using the "debug" module in real code [1], I'd like
to request it be renamed to something like "internal" or "lowlevel" or
"luacore" to reflect that. require("debug") should probably still
work, but it would just be an alias kept around for back
compatibility. The idea is that when new code uses this name, that
would be a clear message that this is code intended for Lua 5.2 and
above, where the library-previously-known-as-"debug" is now considered
generally acceptable to use, not only in the context of debugging.

I know this might seem like a petty, bike-shed-colour kind of a thing
to try to get changed - but I do think that this is a significant
paradigm shift, one that is worth intentionally making clear and
obvious to people.

[1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-05/msg00078.html

-Duncan