Re: wiki sections for micro-patches?

[James Graves <james.c.graves.jr@...>]

Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> James Graves <james.c.graves.jr@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In my opinion, the patch is not useful, and should not be on the wiki.
>
> Aw, there are all kinds of silly things on the lua-users wiki, and
> most of them aren't even mine. (I have more of a "ten years out of
> date" problem.)

Well, A good resource (like a wiki) requires (among other things) good
editing.  If we put in every last thing up there with no regard to
general usefulness, then it will become cluttered and useless.

Sven asked for feedback, and I gave him some.   Be careful what you ask for. :-)

> If somebody links to this patch there, another somebody can edit it to
> point to this thread as well and say "read this first; there are some
> pretty serious incompatibilities if you decide to do this, and it
> might not really be much like Lua." Didn't these kinds of things used
> to be called "power patches"? Too far?

Some of the power patches are generally useful, and some of those are
useful in specific circumstances.  I'm talking about things like the
emergency GC patch for 5.1.  That's a great thing to have for the
power patches page.

However, we can and should have a critical eye towards anything that
breaks source compatibility.

For example, I'm really not keen on things like the C/C++ comments
patch.  It adds no new capability to Lua, which already has
single-line and multi-line comments. A decision was made long ago on
the style of comments for Lua source, and I think the best thing is
that people just try to get used to it.

Even if you write your code with C/C++ comments, you are still likely
to be using other Lua libraries, so you'll be seeing the normal style
comments anyway.  And you (and your users) will see the normal style
comments in the reference manual, books, tutorials, etc..

So, at the end of the day, you will still probably need to get used to
seeing how Lua does comments, even if you don't want to write them
that way.  My editor highlights comments to be the same color, no
matter what the programming language, so that helps a lot.

James Graves