Alright, so, just because I can't seem to keep myself from fiddling with this... I think a similar terse-member function call syntax that wouldn't provoke any parser weirdness would be to use a trailing colon to indicate that a call should begin with an implicit _ENV parameter. And that syntax seems easy to implement via a short diff in the ':' case of primaryexp...
PS: I fear that I now have just enough understanding of the parser to start really getting myself into trouble; but, as best as I can tell, this little diff does properly convert calls of the form "f:(...)" to "f(_ENV,...)". My sense, after poking around in the sources, is that just pushing the function _expression_ onto the register list, followed by _ENV, and then calling funcargs() should be sufficient to implement the transform; and it seems to work fine in practice...
case ':': { /* `:' NAME funcargs */
expdesc key;
luaX_next(ls);
switch(ls->t.token) {
case '(': case TK_STRING: case '{': {
singlevaraux(fs, ls->envn, &key, 1);
luaK_exp2nextreg(fs,v);
luaK_exp2nextreg(fs,&key);
break;
}
default: {
checkname(ls, &key);
luaK_self(fs, v, &key);
break;
}
}
funcargs(ls, v, line);
break;
}
