Re: Lightweight function syntax (again) Re: [ANN] Lua 5.2.0 (alpha-rc2) now available

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Antonio Vieiro
<antonio@antonioshome.net> wrote:
> I think I still don't get the point, or you don't explain it well, so
> I won't spam any longer.

I'm certainly no fan of the Perl line-noise genre.  At university we
would have informal competitions to see how much we could do with one
line of APL.  Brilliant write-only language! And ultimately I like
good old Algol/Pascal style.  But Lua is too good a language to be put
into one bucket, whether that bucket is called 'imperative' or
'object-oriented' or whatever.

Both tables and functions are first-class values in Lua. For tables,
we have very lightweight syntax, {}, (which nobody complains about)
and for functions we have something that needs at least three
keywords.  Event-driven and functional-style programming makes use of
a lot of little closures, and people who program in these styles want
something that isn't so .. ugly.

Yes, it is a question of aesthetics, ultimately, de gustibus non
disputandum and so forth. A language should accommodate different
styles and users.  Personally I agree with Mathew Wild that we need
lexical/syntactical hooks so library writers can construct custom
syntax for particular applications.

steve d.