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On 7/20/2016 4:26 PM, Martin wrote:
This captures much of my feeling about some recent changes. I rather miss Lua 5.2 and earlier where a number was just a number (internally a double on most platforms). And if the bit manipulation operators are the start of a trend, I don't care for that trend. On the other hand, I do really like the ability to easily disable autoconversion of strings to numbers (which is a misfeature IMHO). It can be done in earlier versions but it a fairly extensive hack. I understand that integers are useful to have, particularly where bit flipping as well as arithmetic are needed on the same data. Integer arithmetic is also useful where avoiding rounding error at all costs is necessary (for example, currency calculations)--but integer overflow is an issue in these cases, and I don't know if it is adequately addressed. Integers have added complexity to the language that affects all users, not just those who need it. Maybe having integers as a distinct type would be of help by making the added complexity explicit.<snip> Thank you for clarification, I understand your point. Probably we feel lua language and it's future projections different. Personally I'm not very glad of bitwise operators in 5.3. Yes, they are neat and makes code easier to understand. I'm not glad of string.pack() either. These moves language to more machine-dependent side. Why not add separate arrays type? Why not add +=, /=, ...? Why not add pointers, malloc() and free()? I liked lua for it's minimalism. But feels like it become too popular to ignore mainstream.