bit32 deemed kludgy (Was: Bit ops on boolean arrays?

[Dirk Laurie <dpl@...>]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 07:50:17PM +0200, David J. Slate wrote:
> The use of efficient bit ops to perform high-level operations on bool
> arrays would happen behind the scenes, invisible to the user.  And the
> library functions to operate on these arrays would be more general
> than those of bit32, not restricted to 32 bits, and in my opinion less
> "kludgy".
> 
I heartily agree that the bit32 functions in Lua 5.2 are kludgy,
and don't deserve the status of belonging to the standard library.

Prediction: bit32 will be deprecated in Lua 5.3, if not already
omitted from the beta release of Lua 5.2. 

Everything about it screams against the Zen of Lua: it's 
hardware-specific, not extendable, not surprisingly powerful, 
not compelling at the abstract level, motivated purely by issues
of performance and implementation ...

This stuff belongs in C, not Lua. 

Dirk