On 12 January 2011 22:52, Greg Falcon
<veloso@verylowsodium.com> wrote:
> That is quite correct Roberto, the user is a programmer and one that counts
> from zero.
What an off-topic observation, delivered in such a flippant way.
Maybe I'm reading a tone into your message that isn't there, but why
has the mailing list felt so angry lately?
Yes you are reading into it incorrectly, it is not flippant, off topic or angry.
I did make a comment in IRC wondering if someone would assume it was a dig at Lua and considered if I should clarify the statement. It was to highlight that the programmer in question is not a Lua scripter, as Lua has 1 based indies and the Language was not originally intended for programmers, yet a C programmer which lives in a world of many undefined behaviours.
Lua has two constituencies that must be considered in the design: the
developers who are embedding it into their applications, and the
(possibly non-programmer) end users of those applications. It's
obvious that 1-based arrays are a concession for the latter group,
while the Lua C API is purely a concern of the former.
Yet here you seem to fully understand my comment.
> If you feel these problems should be brought to the wider audience and
> documented then maybe they should rather than, as it seems to me, implying
> to a programer that they can not be trusted and should have their toys
> removed from them like a child.
The point is that there are better ways to do what the reference
system does, so why not take it out, simplifying Lua and encouraging
the better usage patterns at the same time? If you feel like a child
whose toy is being taken away, you could always reimplement the
reference system for your own use. It's straightforward enough. Or
just continue using Lua 5.1: it's perfectly fine, nobody is taking it
away from you, and it will continue to work after 5.2 is released.
Greg F
We obviously differ here and I would like it to stay in the core rather than in a user branch. It is probably true that it would be depreciated before ever getting removed; yet are you suggesting that I do not comment that I personally think it is the wrong thing to remove it? Should I stand on the side lines and when it is removed and too late then say something? I personally do not think the developers realise how much this feature is used in code.
"If you feel like a child whose toy is being taken away, you could always reimplement the reference system for your own use. "
I do not feel like a child and again you have also taken this the wrong way. It was to emphasize that just because there is undefined behaviour it does not mean that "a programer ... can not be trusted " It would seem that because of the points outlined by Mark that it would be better to remove it rather than documenting it and trusting the programmer. Maybe this is because Lua lives in a pretty much safe environment in the script side but again this is not so for a C coder.
If the need comes where I have to implemented it and ship a modified version of the library which may use platform specific code to do so then so be it but that is really not what I would like.
Liam
