Re: Request for clarification on reserved names

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 21 April 2014 18:23, Thijs Schreijer <thijs@thijsschreijer.nl> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org [mailto:lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org] On
>> Behalf Of Hisham
>> Sent: maandag 21 april 2014 19:17
>> To: Lua mailing list
>> Subject: Request for clarification on reserved names
>>
>> The Lua 5.2 (and 5.3) manual(s) say:
>>
>>    Lua is a case-sensitive language: and is a reserved
>>    word, but And and AND are two different, valid names.
>>    As a convention, names starting with an underscore
>>    followed by uppercase letters (such as _VERSION)
>>    are reserved for variables used by Lua.
>>
>> Does that mean (a) all names, (b) global variables only or (c) all
>> variables?
>>
>> The text says "names" which strictly speaking would mean option "a"
>> but I doubt this applies to table fields, so my original
>> interpretation was "b", but then I remembered that _ENV is special
>> even if it's a local variable (and yes, I've had to patch Lua 5.1 code
>> out there which used "_ENV" as a regular variable). I've also seen
>> tutorials out there that inadvertedly suggest _M (ugh) as a table name
>> for declaring modules.
>
>
> See this thread;
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/95848
>
> Your comment on _ENV was not considered in the mentioned thread.

Oh, I missed Roberto's reply in the thread from 2012:

> It seems clear (to me, at least) that Lua does not interfere with what
> you do with your own tables. The Lua convention refers only to its
> own tables (the global environment and the registry).

Should this convention be now extended to local variables then?

-- Hisham