Re: [ANN] Lua 5.2.0 (beta-rc1) now available

[Drake Wilson <drake@...>]

Quoth Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>, on 2011-06-13 15:33:19 -0300:
> The main changes since Lua 5.1 are listed in
> 	http://www.lua.org/work/doc/#changes
[...]
> All feedback welcome. Thanks.

I think "isvarag" is a typo in the change list, no?

It may be advisable to have an os.exit variant that is guaranteed to
not close the state; _exit in C exists for a reason.  (Mainly, forked
processes that need to exit without prematurely doing a cleanup that
will otherwise be done in the parent.)  I'm not sure how common this
is in Lua.

Perhaps I missed an earlier discussion, but why a \* escape rather
than using \ before a newline?  Using \ plus a non-alphanumeric
printing character as an escape can be confusing, in my experience.

Things I strongly approve of: better metamethod support re __len,
__pairs, __ipairs, __gc, __weak (ephemeron); the _ENV mechanism; light
C functions; emergency GC.

Things that I still would like but that appear to be unlikely to make
it: non-copying string construction.  This has been rehashed a few
times already.  I'm not absolutely certain it's worth the complexity,
but a large every-time allocation and write seems likely to be much
more expensive than a few random reads and a large occasional full
comparison.  If only I had the energy to look more thoroughly...

   ---> Drake Wilson