Re: [proposal / postulation]: global keyword that works with lua as config file

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 30.03.2014 19:57 schröbte Andrew Starks:
> I think it's bad, because it might be motivation to not use strict or
> to consider it a "hack."

It *is* a hack. An impressive one because it achieves a lot with little 
code, but on the other hand it modifies a shared resource, so it affects 
other people's code, and prevents them from setting a metatable on `_G` 
themselves (or at least makes it harder). And as you already mentioned, 
there are a lot of alternatives (most of which I consider superior to 
`strict.lua`), and this is my main motivation not to use `strict.lua` ...

> ##Proposal
>
> My idea (probably not a new one) is in two parts:
>
> 1: `global` keyword is (probably) shorthand for rawset(_ENV, var, val)

Most module writers would probably use `rawset` directly anyway, because 
it is compatible with Lua 5.x (for x < 3). I think the current approach 
is `var = nil` somewhere at top level, which is also backwards 
compatible. So, IMHO, a new keyword would do more harm than good ...

> 2: _STRICT is a value that is global and defaults to `false` (or nil,
> but one must be able to assign it globally).

Why not just preload `strict.lua` instead?! Then people can `require` it 
if they want to. But I'd rather use something that works offline (at 
compile time), or at least can be enabled/disabled on a per-chunk basis 
(maybe as a fallback to the offline tool).

> Thanks!
>
> -Andrew

Philipp