Re: A major problem with the Lua ecosystem

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Tim Hill once stated:
> > On Feb 1, 2018, at 8:41 AM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> > It was thus said that the Great Dibyendu Majumdar once stated:
> >> 
> >> Sorry I should know the answer to this but I don't. Does Lua support
> >> dotted module names... i.e. map to directory path?
> > 
> >  You mean something like:
> > 
> > 	net = require "org.conman.net" --?
> > 
> > If so, then yes, Lua does.
> 
> This cleanly solves the external namespace, assuming someone can promote
> some form of standardization around whatever convention is agreed
> (LuaRocks team???). But it leaves open that global variable used for the
> assignment target. If I control the whole corpus of Lua code in a project,
> then I can control the internal global namespace, but if I’m using 3rd
> party Lua code which ITSELF using require(), how to I handle namespace
> collisions on these globals?

  That's really only an issue with lua 5.1, which *will always* create a
global when loading a module.  Lua 5.2+ will no longer create the global and
it's up to the programmer to cache the value from require() into some
variable.

  So yes, this also works:

	local net = require "org.conman.net"

Lua 5.1 will still create a global "org", inside which is "conman" and
inside that "net".  Lua 5.2+ won't do that.

  -spc