Re: Global by default

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Peter Slížik <peter.slizik@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey, this explains a lot:
>
>> Making all variables global by default was a decision taken in the very
>> early
>> days of the design. The rationale is that Lua is designed to be used as
>
>> a configuration language, where end users will hardly ever write their own
>> functions. Now imagine the mess of having to write
>>
>>	global fgcolor="red"
>>	global bgcolor="white"
>>	global tolerance=0.001
>>
>> This seems quite verbose and useless, from the point of view of the end
>> user.
>> So the decision of having globals by default makes sense to us ;-) and
>> we don't feel we need to change it.
>
> (Words by lhf, http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/1997-12/msg00009.html )
>
> However, from what I've gleaned on the web, I had the impression that "local
>
> by default" policy was what prevented Python from having proper lexical
> scoping,
> and vice versa - that lexical scoping prevents Lua from implementing "local
> by default".
>
> Is this true?
>
>
> Peter

Pretty much, yeah.

/s/ Adam