Re: [5.3] Converting a floating point number to integer.

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

On Tuesday, November 18, 2014, Thomas Jericke <tjericke@indel.ch> wrote:
> On 11/18/2014 09:50 AM, Dirk Laurie wrote:
> > 2014-11-18 10:16 GMT+02:00 Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com>:
> >
> > > > On Nov 17, 2014, at 10:29 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > 2014-11-18 6:11 GMT+02:00 Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com>:
> > > >
> > > > > Now, I know what is going on, and you know what is going on.
> > > > > But does the average scripter know?
> > > > Does the average scripter know what is going on with
> > > > metamethods, coroutines, the call stack, upvalues etc?
> > > >
> > > > Some things in Lua are hard merely because the
> > > > underlying computer science concept is hard.
> > > And your point is?
> > That arguments based on how "the average scripter" or
> > "newbies" would react are not relevant for Lua. Maybe
> > for Basic or Logo, but not Lua.
> >
> > Lua is a highly sophisticated all-purpose language, not
> > particularly convenient for scripting (e.g. os.execute and
> > io.popen need to be invoked explicitly, no syntactic sugar).
> > Lua 5.3 beta has moved strongly in the direction of greater
> > awareness of hardware features: just look at §6.4.2, which
> > speaks of alignment, endianness, size_t etc assuming that
> > the reader knows what is going on.
> /*
> ** $Id: lua.h,v 1.319 2014/10/17 19:17:55 roberto Exp $
> ** Lua - A Scripting Language
> ** Lua.org, PUC-Rio, Brazil (http://www.lua.org)
> ** See Copyright Notice at the end of this file
> */
>
> A scripting language that not particularly convenient for scripting?
>
> I think there is no agreement here what 'scripting' means.
> I am not really sure either, but I am sure, that accessing the OS is not a relevant criteria. ECMAScript is a good counter example for this kind of scripting language,
> as you can't access the OS directly at all.
> --
> Thomas

Tim and Dirk's arguments are very well-made and I won't choose a side.

Lua is a scripting language that should, and does, provide a simple and consistent environment, within the constraints of a C89+ library. There are other areas where more simplicity is possible, but not provided, because of a mixture of complexity and a lack of "one clear answer."

I also think that it might be hard to predict the impact in the Real World. It will not be zero. Will it stick out amongst all of the other, subtle ways in which programming reminds you that you're working with abstractions? I would predict no. 

In my case, I would much rather have this behavior than a promotion to float, for example. 

-Andrew