Re: Nil and false in Lua design

[Thomas Jericke <tjericke@...>]

On 10/14/2013 06:43 AM, steve donovan wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Thomas Jericke <tjericke@indel.ch> wrote:
> > If you ever happen to reconsider this, I am a big supporter for a change.
> > For me it is a real joy to read code in a language that only accepts boolean
> > values for logical expressions including if and while conditions.
> Except that there are hundreds of thousands of lines out there that do
> 'if val' assuming that nil evaluates to false.
Well, nobody is forcing them to update to Lua 6 ;-)
> There's really only two
> cases - it's not like C./Python where you have to consider zero as
> well.  And languages which think that '' is false rightly deserve our
> scorn.
It doesn't make that much of a difference. Of course C is even worse, 
but once you broke the rule that a non-boolean value can be used in a if 
statement you already go down that path.
> (However, I could definitely live with no default number -> string
> conversions e.g. in concatenation. That would be cleaner)
What's whith the hunders and thousand lines of code?

--

Thomas