Re: MoonScript, a language that compiles to Lua

[Pierre Chapuis <catwell@...>]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:36:12 +0200, Axel Kittenberger wrote:
> > Except it forces indentation and structure in cases where it's not
> > entirely necessary. I like being able to write:
> > if x then doThings(x) else doThings(y) end
> > instead of:
> > if x then
> >    doThings(x)
> > else
> >    doThings(y)
>
> Did you actually work with any significant whitespace language? E.g.
> in python both work very well. You can always write all things in one
> line if you want to.
>
> What you just cannot do is:
>
>   if x then
> doThings(x)
>           else
> doThings(y)

To clarify in case you don't use Python: it doesn't only rely on
whitespace for conditionals, ie. you don't write this:

  if x
    doThings(x)
  else
    doThings(y)

but this:

  if x:
    doThings(x)
  else:
    doThings(y)

which you can write like this:

  if x: doThings(x)
  else: doThings(y)

I am not sure you can cleanly make this a one liner though.

An approach I like to solve the problem and make everybody
happy is the one used by the Go language: whitespace is not
significant but there is a canonical indentation style and
a tool (gofmt) that enforces it.

I don't see a reason why this wouldn't work with Lua. It is
probably possible to make a parser that takes valid Lua code
and returns a canonical representation for it.

--
Pierre 'catwell' Chapuis