Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work2) now available (number coercion holy crusade)

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 24 March 2014 10:47, Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> Most common breakage seem to be (%d+) captures. [...]
>
> That is my experience too. (Not sure about the "most common", but sure
> about a "quite common".)

I just hacked together this super-ugly patch [1] (Roberto's patch plus
a hack to make tonumber work) just to run the LuaRocks test suite with
coercions off and see what happened.

The results: it ran successfully! Looks like my strongly-typed brain
hasn't failed me and I've been treating Lua as if it never had
string-to-number coercions in the first place.

I just checked the code and all my (%d+)'s were already religiously
followed by uses of tonumber.

If the addition of integers will make people review string conversions
in their code anyway, perhaps now is a good time to at least deprecate
automatic coercion, giving people a #define so they can test their
code without it and prepare for the future.

I haven't tried to run the LuaRocks testsuite with 5.3 yet because it
uses a number of rockspecs which are not marked to be 5.3-compatible
and therefore will fail with an "unsupported version" error message.
Porting them all is a larger task.

-- Hisham
who really likes a disciplined, typed world

[1] https://gist.github.com/hishamhm/9750528