Re: explicit mode

[Duane Leslie <parakleta@...>]

> Still: what speaks against implementing a new Lua compilation mode where everything must be explicitly declared to be either local or global, and anything not so declared would result in a compilation error?


I'm not sure of the philosophical arguments but I provided a patch that implements just this only a couple of weeks ago.

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2016-05/msg00024.html

One limitation is that you cannot declare globals in the way you want to, globals are actually just table lookups in the `_ENV` table and you cannot really control table lookups.  A common work-around for globals that I used prior to this patch was to declare all the globals I wanted as locals and the set `_ENV` to nil.  This is a simple mechanism to get a runtime error on using undeclared globals (i.e. not copied to locals).

The patch has two effects, it declares which upvalues are allowed (or using `...` allows any) and also declares their order, which makes it much easier to dump and load pre-compiled functions.

Regards,

Duane.