Re: io.format (was: Reported to the Bloat Police: string.pack, .unpack and .packsize!)

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2015-08-20 11:12 GMT+02:00 John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk>:

> My point here is that high level languages are supposed
> to be something you can learn and use without having to
> consult a reference guide all the time.

This "is like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock, which not
only is itself discredited but casts a shade of doubt over all
previous assertions. " [1] The only language I ever used
which has this property is Pascal in Wirth's original version,
and that is not a very high-level language. Languages like
C++, Ada, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python are all worse like Lua in
this respect. LaTeX, especially LaTeX2e, ditto.

The nearest I can come to agreeing with you is that "high level
languages have useful subsets that you can learn and use
without having to consult a reference guide all the time."
That's true for Lua. (I have, even now, not yet added the
coroutine library to my subset.)

Just ignore string.pack and string.unpack. Heck, wipe them
if you must. One-line multiple assigment to nil. You don't
even need to type two nils.

[1] http://ansible.uk/writing/miscases.html