Re: Moonscript as a useful notation for Lua users

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Jon Akhtar <akhtar@mindspring.com> wrote:

My read was: "Here is a bolder version of an idea you guys said I was crazy for having. They did it, and it's not bad"

Heh, that original post was half serious and the question was half rhetorical ;)  I used to be a person who did not accept Osterhout's Dichomtomy, that both the 'system' and the 'glue' language could be C++, given a fast REPL. for C++.  After some years actually building that REPL, I've come to feel I was mistaken - the different syntax of the glue means less semantic mixup with the server language.

He's right about terseness. Function declarations, and the other block owning statements in Lua are annoying without a good editor.

The question is: is it annoying to _type_ or to _read_?  We've gone around that bush several times.  In the extreme case of an ideologically crippled language like Java requiring loads of boilerplate to do a simple callback, I think reading suffers.  Not sure about Lua, however.

Having something like Moonscript around takes pressure off Lua itself, since MS is like a wishlist containing many features I've seen proposed for Lua.  Generally Lua is better for not having taken these on, but it's nice to be able to express Lua concepts concisely when in informal contexts like in an interactive session, or for testing.

The _only_ thing I occaisionally still miss in Lua is a short function syntax, but that ain't going to fly.

steve d.