Re: Thoughts on optional commas

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

Now that we have had some discussion, let's just look at the original post
again.

> Occasionally I forget commas when I create large nested tables in Lua.  It
> reminds me of when I was learning c and always forgetting to place semicolons at
> the end of a line.  I'm so happy that semicolons are optional in Lua.  I wish
> commas were too.
>

Now, an omitted comma (except in examples specially concocted by DC)
is recognized at compile time.  The program will not run and give incorrect
results.  It is a harmless error.

Suppose that commas were optional.  Spurious spaces are immediately
promoted to valid table delimiters.  Consider the following incorrect code:

a = {3.715570115524504276103660468 E-100}

(I cut-and-pasted it from the output of another program. That program
puts a space before the E. I have no control over the format.  )

At present I get a helpful error message for this, I correct it, and go on.

With the proposed change, if I happened to have given E a numerical value,
there is no error at compile time.  Much later, I may recognize that the
calculated numbers are out by 100 orders of magnitude.  It can easily
take a day's debugging to find such an insidious mistake.

All this, so that a programmer who is by own admission prone to forget
punctuation can have that weakness pandered to?  No thanks.