Re: Syntactic conventions

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:13 AM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> I think what we *can* get is a view of a particular 1990 aesthetic. Like
> many languages of the period, Perl was deeply scarred by the simultaneous
> need for automatic storage management but fear/envy of garbage collection.
> malloc is macho. Reference counting is efficient. Creating references is a
> special act.

Maybe so, but the need for $ for each variable escapes me.  I was a
fan of Awk and that was a clean little language, very focussed on its
job but flexible enough for other things.  The FAQ says that two
reasons for using Awk over Perl (other things being equal) is that awk
is rather smaller and you don't have to use dollars everywhere.

So $ in Lua identifiers would bother me - use would immediately split
into the front-$ and the back-$ camps anyway. It all feels like
bikeshedding because it's very hard to think of adding something to
Lua that would have a multiplier effect on its expressiveness or use.