Re: Learning Javascript from Lua?

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

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Dimiter "malkia" Stanev
<malkia@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I miss from Pascal, implementation wise - Turbo/Borland/Inprise is the
> Unit systems - binary compiled units that a compiler can load and get
> definitions automatically. No need for header files and such.

Yes, the old Unix C model, which IHMO has proved a great pain point in
C++[1]. I note that the Unix founders have moved on, and Go has a
similar compiled-unit system (object files with rich metadata) and so
it compiles very fast. (There are other Pascal influences, like 'var
variable type' order in declarations.)

> Also the "with" statement, somewhat the custom arrays range, and few other
> things.

Oh no, 'with' was not good!  I look back on the Delphi code I wrote
and can no longer tell what field belongs to what in with statements.

Axel is completely right - ultimately it's marketing and mindshare
that determines what wins. Still, JavaScript is not the worst thing
that could have happened at that point in history. And a Lua
background helps tremendously.

Now if I only could understand what this damn word 'this' means ;)

steve d.

[1] C++ compilers aren't really slow, but having to process 20K lines
of headers for a simple program does slow them down a little bit.