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

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick@...>]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
> 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 ...

Everything you said applies equally well to other libraries like "os"
or "io". We still have those libraries because they're useful. Having
a bit library is easily arguably more useful than "os" or "io".

The author's encourage you to customize Lua for your project. If you
don't like a library, throw it out.

-- 
- Patrick Donnelly