But I sometimes daydream about making all of Lua's statements into
expressions, removing 'stat' altogether.
Honestly, I'd vote to keep the ternary operator out of the base
language (just like classes, exceptions, monads, continuations,
actors, macros, cons cells, arrays, fixed-point arithmetic, matrices).
If you like OOP, go for Java, C++, C# and the likes;
If you like FP, go for Haskell or Lisps;
If you want to do systems' programming in an interpreted language, go
for Python or Ruby.
Frankly, for me Lua is an imperative language with simple syntax augmented with:
- first class functions (and coroutines, lexical scoping, tail calls);
- the almighty table (data structure, namespace, metatable,
environment, switch statement, object, class, functor),
And It should be used either has an embedded language or for data description.
Frankly, my knee-jerk reaction to something like this is always: "This
guy is complaining that he can't use is hammer like a screwdriver",
but I'm the first to recognize that I've never used Lua for anything
other than having fun (nor have I contributed very positively to any
discussion in this list).
