Re: Q&A with Roberto on Workshop 2012

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Sat, Dec 1, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Sven Olsen <sven2718@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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

I'd say that for pl.utils you're probably best off using the old
syntax ("local pl_utils = require("pl.utils")") -- it doesn't violate
DRY because you're NOT repeating yourself if you don't want the object
named just "utils".

/s/ Adam