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On 1/28/11 8:06 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
There was very good reason for that battle cry.Certainly there was. 40 years ago. At that time, most people used FORTRAN IV or assembler, which do not have ifs or whiles. Most people learned to program without ever seeing proper control structures. Programmers not only had to use gotos; they did not have proper mental models to organize those gotos. Things changed a little since then. -- Roberto Hi Roberto, I don't know, you are saying you should have the mental models in place to use gotos to not do stupid things with them, before using Lua? Is Lua still aiming at beginners, non-programmers, I wonder. This discussion does not look like it, again. I like Assembler, and C, it's not that I have a personal aversion against gotos. I think were that might go might be exciting. But "the right tool for the right job" automatically positions Lua, like anything else. Gotos would reposition it. I was having Paul Hudak's thoughts on the vitality of language niches in the back of my head: "... it appears that for a language to become popular it needs an application - a /niche/ - in which it excels, or in which it at least was the first to arrive. Curiously, for most language designers, this is the /opposite/ of what is desired. Most language designers would like their languages to be truly general purpose, able to solve all of the world's problems with great succinctness, clarity and efficiency. ..." (Paul Hudak, The Haskell School of _expression_, http://books.google.de/books?id=lQbth9j5j9oC&lpg=PR14&ots=JPktZbA_MB&pg=PR14) Even if his hopes, in the instance, maybe did not come true for Haskell. You EXCELLED at focusing, as far as I can see, which is why Lua is as strong as it is, in my eyes. It found it's niche I thought. Sometimes it looks a lot like you don't care to cater to it. I can appreciate if you simply don't care (no sarcasm). But I am a little surprised and would like to understand that better. I guess I can even live with sticking with Lua 5.1 forever. It might be all you ever need and the fallacy, to think that Lua should not evolve into something else. But really, that might confuse a lot of people. Best, Henning |