Re: Coercion: which do we want in the next version?

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2016-07-13 9:36 GMT+01:00 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can live with -DLUA_NOCVTN2S if I must, but the convenience
>> of being able to use table.concat on an array of numbers will be
>> sorely missed, and setting a __concat metamethod for numbers
>> won't bring it back.
>
> That's exactly the problem - such assumptions are made in a lot of Lua
> code out there!

Let us not forget that one of the key attributes of Lua is that when
the authors are faced with a trade-off between improving the language
and maintaining backware compatibility, they choose to improve the
language. And this attribute gets exponentiated by every version
that's released. With time that's the main reason Lua as a language is
so great while others from Perl to Python are so bad.

Sure sometimes we lose a convenience, or we have to adjust existing
working code. We've lived with that for decades now, I don't see any
compelling reason to stop improving Lua now.