Re: Suggestion: left hand reference operator in assignment

[Rob Kendrick <rjek@...>]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 06:59:29AM -0700, stuart@testtrack4.com wrote:
> This is a simple syntactic sugar addition that would make code a lot
> easier to maintain and refactor, and make idioms much clearer. I've been
> thinking about how I'd want something like this for a long time, and I
> think I've finally come up with how it could work.
> 
> The idea is simple: allow a fixed character on the right-hand side of an
> assignment statement to refer to the left-hand variable(s). For example,
> if I have a variable like this:
> 
>     local extremely_long_variable_name = 1
> 
> and I want to increment it by 1, I have to type its name twice:
> 
>     extremely_long_variable_name = extremely_long_variable_name + 1

This comes up a lot.  I think the cleanest, most elegant solution that
does not introduce magical syntax or complex decisions about metamethods
is to use shorter variable names.  Or a macro in your text editor.

B.