Re: Propsoal: a lua dialect without nil

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:01 PM, joao lobato <btnfdp.lobato@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, you want lisp :)

Best one-liner of the day, sir!

I think what Axel is thinking (he must correct me if I'm wrong) is
that he wants to separate presentation from representation. So just as
using tabs means that the presentation can be trivially changed by
setting the width of a tab, he can customize how he wants to see code
more generally. For instance, if working in a curly-bracket language
and you are irritated by the brace style, you can change the
presentation so that it isn't so insanely space-wasting.  Or even
(gasp) present and edit Lua as a curly-bracket language.

Not a new idea, certainly do-able, but I'm not certain if it's worth
the effort. Language differences are not skin-deep; should ++i in
C-view automatically become i=i+1 in Lua-view? Should C-style
for-loops be translated appropriately? Should a grown-up developer
need such pandering?

Also, we gain valuable cues from the appearance of a language - 'this
looks like Lua, load my personal Lua-thinking module' etc. If it looks
like JavaScript, then well, you might think that a + b means string
concatenation and arrays start at zero ;)

steve d.