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

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

On Apr 25, 2014, at 5:13 AM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd like to discuss allowing @, $, !, and ? in identifier names.  I
> chose these explicitly because they can't be confused with an operator
> at the end of an identifier.
> 
> I was told I could just modify lctype.c and add these characters for
> my personal build of Lua.  That is definitely possible, but I'd like
> to hear from the community if this is something others want --
> especially at a time when we are eagerly watching the changes in the
> 5.3 work versions.
> 

-1 on this for me. As Dirk says, if you add these to the list of identifiers you remove them from the pool of symbols available for future syntax. And I’m not really sure that “is_xxx()” is any worse than “xxx?()”, which would certainly cause ME to dive into the manual to try to figure out if the syntax had any special semantics.

—Tim