Re: Suggestion for 5.3: import() for creating a "slew" of locals

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

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Rob Kendrick <rjek@rjek.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 09:59:43AM +0000, Sir Pogsalot wrote:
>> I'm just not terribly in love with the languages that compile to other
>> languages thing...
>
> Like C? :)

Exactly! Everything compiles to some 'lower-level language'. It's a
very popular implementation strategy for new languages, since you can
leverage all the work that went into compiling the target language,
e.g. Nimrod -> C, Ceylon -> Java, Coffeescript -> JavaScript.
Moonscript to Lua means that one can use 5.1, 5.2, and LuaJIT without
having to worry about the different bytecode formats.  And one hardly
notices the extra compilation step in Moonscript anyway, due to  the
speed of LPeg.

_However_, I don't find it so easy to justify half-assed code
preprocessing like my own LuaMacro. Most people don't have enough
experience and taste to use user-extensible syntax wisely (and I'm
including myself in that majority)