Re: mathlib

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2014-04-07 21:16 GMT+02:00 Hisham <h@hisham.hm>:
> On 7 April 2014 15:40, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2014-04-07 20:36 GMT+02:00 Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br>:
>>>> 3. A depressing feeling that Lua is going in a direction that
>>>> is by design unsympathetic to those who know a little more
>>>> mathematics than they teach you at school.
>>>
>>> That is ridiculous.
>>
>> It is ridiculous by design, in order to have something just as ridiculous
>> as reason 3 for preferring removal: "A warm feeling under the heart that
>> creeping featurism is being combated by removing some features."
>
> Except that creeping featurism _is_ combated by removing features.
> People are asking for features to be added and are being granted that;
> to keep the language small, sometimes things have to go away. Lua is
> adding important features.

Comments were invited from lua-l for a proposal that started off:
"We are considering removing some functions from the standard
math lib". The impression I got was that the question was still
open, that comments on the list this way or that would influence
the decision.

There has been more negative reaction, in stronger language too,
to every point raised in favour of keeping the functions, from PUC-Rio
than from any of the users elsewhere. The one point that is hard to
argue against, that the saving in executable size is less that 0.1%,
has been ignored.

This suggests that in fact the decision has already been taken. If that
is the case, please tell us so, then we can close this discussion.