Lua coding standards (was: Re: One more item to the collection of Lua hate-speech)

[fernando <fernando@...>]

David,

When working on nutria project I was in troubles about applying which coding standard to lua, because, AFAIK there is no official choice. So I have decided to use a Drupal Conding Standards: http://drupal.org/coding-standards, weird but helped my eyes a lot :)

Take a look to the code and you will see what I mean: http://gitorious.org/nutria

Blessings.

--
Fernando P. García, http://www.develcuy.com
+51 1 9 8991 7871,  Calle Santa Catalina Ancha #377, Cusco - Perú

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---- On Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:31:15 -0500 David Manura <dm.lua@math2.org> wrote ---- 

> On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:18 PM, liam mail <liam.list@googlemail.com> wrote: 
> > If I were to be totally honest the thing which I dislike most about Lua is 
> > the keyword 'local', I dislike typing it over and over again and that the 
> > fact the default scope is global. Having edited third party code, it also 
> > seems to encourage the use of the globals although this is not to say that 
> > the same authors would have used scoped variables in other languages. 
>  
> The "Huffman encoding" language design principle in Perl says that 
> common operations should have shorter syntax than less common 
> operations.  A slightly different formulation expressed in the Lua 
> community is that dangerous operations should look ugly [1].  In Lua, 
> we have "a=b" for re-assignment or, if coding policy permits [2], 
> global variable definition, and we then have the longer "local a=b" 
> for lexical variable definition.  In the interest of minimizing 
> complexity (number of plausible states), users should strive to use 
> lexical variable definitions and minimize use of variable 
> re-assignments and globals, but the syntax may encourage the opposite 
> here.  The same criticism could be said of other procedural languages, 
> but a number of these use the shorter keyword 'var' [4], and Perl has 
> an even shorter though curiously named 'my'.  The Go language also has 
> a short-hand: using "a := b" rather than "a = b" is analogous to 
> "local a = b" in Lua.  Regardless of syntax though, the linter [2] 
> could limit the use of '=', and one's text editor could use color and 
> font to make less desirable operations like mutating assignment and 
> global variable definition more prominent [3], or in a way more 
> "expensive" syntactically. 
>  
> BTW, concerning the relationship between Lua syntax and user coding 
> practice, what I see regularly is poorly indented Lua code when Lua is 
> used embedded (and perhaps not by professional programmers).  Baring a 
> draconian approach like Python, the solution again may be the linter 
> and text editor offering assistance. 
>  
> [1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-05/msg00481.html 
> [2] http://lua-users.org/wiki/DetectingUndefinedVariables 
> [3] http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaInspect 
> [4] _javascript_, Go, and to some extent C#