Re: Arithmetic on strings

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

2012/7/7 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Me too.
>
> Ditto. The code it breaks is code that's going to break 'by accident'
> in some way later.
>

There's just one thing: input of numbers.  At present, I can write:

s=0; k=0
grade="Ann 57, Bob 64,Cat 77, Don 62, Eve 51"
for n in grade:gmatch("%d+") do s=s+n; k=k+1 end
print(s/k)

I don't see this code breaking "by accident".

Are we really going to improve quality-of-life for the public
by fascistically taking away this freedom?

I vote for this solution: remove string coercion, but make it
easy to enable/disable the necessary metamethods that give
the same effect.  For at least one release, let string coercion
by metamethods still be the default.