Re: Proposal: allow @, $, !, and ? in Lua identifiers

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Friday, April 25, 2014, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> > How is <> used in Pascal?
>
> It is "not equal".
>
> > Also, I would like to see ~= changed to !=.
>
> Apparently ~ is a bitch to type on some keyboards, so allowing it as
> an alternative might be an idea (Moonscript does this [1])
>
> > I'd be in favor of not allowing it at the beginning of an identifier, yes :>
>
> Ah, but that's exactly where people will want to use it - so they can
> do JQuery in Lua ;)
>
> [1] leaf has collected just about every rejected feature from lua-l
> and rolled them into his own language.  It actually works pretty well,
> although I still dislike \ for method calls.

There is a subtle point being made on the parent thread to this one:

1: Lua is open sources, small, well designed and easily modified

2: Here are some links where you can see how to implement these changes yourself. 

3: enjoy!

Lua is a C library with a pretty minimalistic REPL. It's okay to modify it for your own purposes. That's the primary path of improvement. It's also what moonscript is for. 

I look forward to hearing about your experiences in implementing it and living with it for a while. I will appreciate that you took the time to do that and to share your findings. Maybe others will join you in that process? 

With that data in hand, evaluating this proposal will be enjoyable!

-Andrew

(My prior posts are waiting to come back to haunt me.)