Re: Thoughts on optional commas

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 04/03/2012 0.59, Greg wrote:
> > Feel free to create a patch and use it yourself, but don't expect a lot
> > of people to support losing such a core feature. Even if you never say:
> >
> > foo "bar"
> >
> > or
> >
> > foo{ bar=1 }
>
>
> I agree that this is pretty nice.  It don't use it nearly as often as I use
> commas.  My average Lua file has over 200 commas and not many instances of foo{
> bar=1}.   I usually only this with require statements.  Ex: require "utils"
>
> - Greg
I've almost got lost in the thread, but it seems no one has mentioned 
DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Lua is awesome in this respect. Without being able to omit parentheses 
in the case of a single string/table, any Lua-based DSL would look much 
clumsier. Compare:


BeginSection [[news]]
  Link "C-programming" {href = "etc.", title = "a book on C"}
  Link "I love Lua" {href = "etc.", title = "an essay"}
EndSection()

which is legal Lua syntax now, would become fairly ugly with mandatory 
parentheses!

I wouldn't really forfeit this ability in exchange for the "optional 
comma": too big a loss for little reward IMO.

Cheers.
-- Lorenzo