A suggestion for Lua 5.3 manual Section 8 (was "A rant about backward-incompatible changes")

[Peter Aronoff <telemachus@...>]

Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lua does, too. The feature in question spent the full duration of 5.2
> clearly marked as "deprecated" and was accordingly removed from the next
> major revision.

This is true and fair enough.

Nevertheless, I would still suggest that the Lua 5.3 manual should add, in
section 8.1 Changes in the Language, the following:

	* unpack was moved to table.unpack

It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that, but I think it would be
useful to list it explicitly in the manual for the simple reason that users may
be familiar with `unpack` from Lua 5.2 but not have followed or noted the
deprecation. In fact, I can list at least two users who were bit by this: Simon
and me. I only recently found out about the change after tests broke in CI. It
was easy to fix, but the first thing I did was look in section 8 of Lua's manual,
and I didn't find anything there. I was surprised. (I was actually going to
write the list about this today, separately from any of this.)


Thanks, Peter
-- 
We have not been faced with the need to satisfy someone else's
requirements, and for this freedom we are grateful.
    Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System