It really is a great syntax, and this example has won me over. I.e.
new features should not be one-trick ponies; they should enable new
classes of tricks.
Tragically, there's a bug in my example. I didn't notice the '.' in Jay's 'pl.utils'. One could use a string conversion convention to write a version of _IMPORT that would allow
local pl_utils in _IMPORT ==> local pl_utils = import 'pl.utils'
But I'm not certain it's a good idea. Still, Peter's table unpack is an excellent syntax. And an unexpectedly powerful one. For example, we can use a similar __newindex trick to set a large collection of variables to the same value.
a00,b00,a10,b10,a11,b11,t0,t1 in generate(0)
This means that in many situations, table unpack can actually fill the same role as assignment chaining -- and unlike assignment chaining, it's quite compatible with Lua's existing syntax.
-Sven
