Re: proposal: state machine syntax also usable for continue / nested break

[Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@...>]

I gave a lot of thought into this, and I said no, you cannot put
"extreme cleanliness" as replacement in there. Lua is much to
pragmatic for that. Lua's adjectives are: small and fast. And thats
it, thats also why I chose it, and somehow started to believe about
easiness/cleaness, but it is not, and wasnt a goal. The degree it has
on some places is by coincidence, and possible a sideeffect of
reductionism. Example are: Lua has weak, dynamic typing, not a
particular clean combo, but it circumvents most problems by having the
concat operator and by only having one numeric type, so the pains on
other languages with that combo by implicit floating point/integer
conversation do not apply. A clean as in *extreme cleanliness*
language would not implicitly translate between numbers and strings, a
pragmatic language does. Same with truth value, "extreme cleanliness"
would only allow true and false for logic operations, forcing you to
write ~= nil to test on not nil. Same with (and sorry to bring it up
again) #, in Lua it is small by not storing the last computed count in
memory and fast by having O(log n) by doing binary search. A language
that would put cleanliness above speed/size, would accept O(n) and do
a linear walk, and optionally cache computed sizes. It is okay that
Lua is not, its its niche. As I wrote before, in hindsight many of the
discussions in the past are around this different goals. Implicit
globals are another not so clean idea, that doesnt mean that implicit
locals are not just as dirty, but a clean as in "extreme cleanliness"
language, wouldn't do neither implicit - as has been written by David
Olofson, what do a few more keystrokes then and when mean against
spending a lot of time searching for a bug.

So can we have some way to continue loops that is small and fast? Dont
care about cleanliness, but another do end block just to continue is
not a small solution either, is it?

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Javier Guerra Giraldez
<javier@guerrag.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I perceived it and have chosen for it, it was:
>>  * easy, small, fast
>
> i'd say:
>
> clean, small, fast
>
> where the perceived easiness arises from the extreme cleanliness
>
> --
> Javier
>
>