Re: Lightweight syntax: a dissident view

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

On Nov 27, 2010, at 4:35 AM, Luis Carvalho wrote:

> Finally, I'd like to comment that while it's almost impossible to not pitch in
> your two cents in this thread, the discussion would be much enriched if
> somehow guided by the Lua team; for instance, how does this discussion --
> being it about shorter functions or borderline statements as expressions and
> macros -- fits in the big plan for Lua? Would such proposals be considered?

Or to put a more focused point on this discussion but stepping away from syntactic specificities: Should functions (or some functions) be as well supported syntactically as tables? What would be gained by doing so? How much clarity would be lost by doing so? Etc. (Obviously the clarity question fairly rapidly comes back to syntax.)

And on a broader level, are there particular styles of programming that Lua is aiming for supporting well?

For example, I would say that thanks to the colon operator Lua is fairly friendly to object-based programming. It is far less friendly to traditional classes + inheritance based object-oriented models though those can more or less be constructed using the facilities provided in Lua.

Mark