Re: Lua and backwards compatibility - was Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.4 (rc2) now available,

[tomas <tomas@...>]

Hi

I work with Lua since 2.1 days and my team maintain code developed 
initialy with CGILua 3, 20 years ago, and were converted/upgraded to 
every new Lua version until 5.2 (we are planning to upgrade to Lua 5.3, 
but we have to wait for the libraries: CGILua, LuaFileSystem, LuaSQL, 
LuaExpat, LuaSOAP, LuaSec, LuaSocket, CGILua LuaZip, lua-iconv, LPEG, 
HTK, Dado).  So we did many upgrades and converted our code many times.  
Maybe our case is too particular to generalize, but that task was always 
a simple and easy task.

I think the Lua team always made a good judgement when faced with the 
problem of introducing a new feature and also an incompatibility.  I 
don't think this should be changed.

Regards,
Tomás

On 2017-01-12 01:58, Charles Heywood wrote:
> I feel a problem would arise with, for example, loadstring and unpack
> being (re)moved.
>
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2017, 21:47 Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 2017-01-12 3:18 GMT+02:00 William Ahern
> > <william@25thandclement.com>:
> >
> > > If Lua 5.3 really is good enough, given Lua's track record I
> > would expect
> > > future versions to naturally maintain strong backwards
> > compatibility,
> > > regardless of any specific intent to do so. Indeed, for most
> > problems it's
> > > trivial to write Lua 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 compatible code.
> >
> > Perhaps someone concerned about these issues could design
> > a specification of "clean Lua", the intersection of Lua 5.1, 5.2
> > and
> > 5.3, and provide a tool that checks whether code conforms to it.
>
> --