Re: Desired Lua Features

[Paige DePol <lual@...>]

Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com> wrote:

> But aren’t you assuming that one person is doing all the coding? In any
> large project you might inherit code from different people (including
> those who have long gone), and they may have decided the “optional” syntax
> was nice, even though you had never come across it before. And where do
> you draw the line on all those nice little “tweaky” enhancements? A dozen?
> Two dozen? Welcome to PL/1, or Java, or C++, or Ruby, or …

Not really, I assume when coding in project where multiple people are
contributors that I will have to deal with any number of coding styles,
or syntax that I don't like but others use... that is just how it works
when you code with other people. Never mind projects that use code from a
variety of languages to achieve their goals... that is always interesting!


> To my mind, any change to Lua should be able to answer “yes” to at least
> one of these questions (necessary but not sufficient justification):
> 
> -- Does it improve the runtime performance for real-world code (not benchmarks)?
> -- Does it increase the clarity of the language?
> -- Does it increase the functionality of the language?
> 
> I don’t think Dirk’s suggestion #2 does that.

Fair enough, though I am not quite sure how you will gauge the overall
performance of the code without benchmarking at least some of it? Not
all benchmarks are useless... a good benchmark should cover most of
your use cases and test those areas known to be weak, especially if
the language itself is changing or the coders are making improvements.

I think the clarity and functionality points are subjective though.
What you think muddies the waters, others may think makes the intent
of their code stand out more. Remember, I did come from the land of
Perl prior to Lua, so "there's more than one way to do it" is still
a bit of an influence... but I don't plan to make Lua++ anywhere near
as verbose with syntax as Perl is!

So far most of the changes I have made to Lua++ have all been in the
realm of improving performance. However, that doesn't mean that every
single change will necessarily have that as a goal, some changes may
just be syntactical in nature because I like how the new syntax works.

~Paige