Re: Multiple assignments to the same variable

[Henk Boom <henk@...>]

On 13 July 2010 22:54, Kevin Vermeer <reemrevnivek@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Petite Abeille <petite.abeille@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 13, 2010, at 8:34 PM, Romulo wrote:
>>
>> >> Usually we consider that what the manual does not say is undefined.
>> >
>> > Or overlooked.
>>
>> Same difference.
>>
> No, that's not the same difference.  Some aspects of Lua may simply be
> overlooked, i.e. the assignments are guaranteed to happen in order to be
> left to right, and so the behavior can be depended upon after it is
> documented - it just didn't seem significant to the author of the
> documentation at the time.  Other aspects may cause demons to fly out of
> your nose.

I would think that things that are not specified in the official
documentation may change from release to release without warning.
Also, someone writing an alternate lua implementation would not be
required to respect the reference implementation's behaviour in order
for their implementation to be "correct". There's a difference between
"you can depend on it in version 5.1.4 of the reference
implementation" and it being actually defined.

Documenting details which are thought to be unimportant actually makes
it more difficult to make internal changes without breaking the API.
(of course, whether or not a certain detail is considered "important"
might vary from person to person)

    henk