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

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

Hi William,

On 12 January 2017 at 01:18, William Ahern <william@25thandclement.com> wrote:
> OTOH, Lua wouldn't be the language it is today if backwards compatibility
> was a higher priority. Features like closures over mutable variables and
> stackful coroutines wouldn't have been developed; features which arguably
> are now defining characteristics of Lua relative to other languages. Other
> than Scheme, I can't think of any other non-academic language with similarly
> powerful constructs. And that's largely because before they get there
> language designers and implementers decide their language is "good enough"
> and switch into long-term maintenance mode where, at best, only pale
> imitations of the above can be added.
>

I am relatively new to Lua so my knowledge of Lua history may be
flaky, but I thought these features you mention were introduced in Lua
5.0 in 2003? So they can hardly be justification for incompatibilities
between 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. Or am I missing something?

Regards
Dibyendu