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

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 12:30 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
<roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> Lua 5.1 is going to be around a lot longer than that, considering
>> LuaJIT. LuaJIT has explicitly chosen not to follow Lua 5.2's path, so
>> it's not just a question of it lagging behind but a matter of it
>> forking from 5.1.
>
> LuaJIT has not been Lua 5.1 a long time ago. As you said, it is a fork,
> and it is following its own path. Anyone that uses LuaJIT for some time
> is unable to return to Lua 5.1. The compatibility is one-way only.
>
> I just saw the numbers of downloads of different versions of Lua in
> Debian, and Lua 5.2 is following a pattern quite similar to 5.1, as we
> expected. (Lua 5.1 took around four years to bypass Lua 5.0, in a time
> when Lua usage was much more restricted than now. Even today, there is
> still a lot of downloads of Lua 5.0 by other programs that need that
> version.)
>
> -- Roberto
>

Yes, it is one-way compatibility, but as a result people interested in
portable code will be targeting 5.1 (actually 5.1/5.2 common subset)
code for a long time in order to maximize portability.

/s/ Adam