Fwd: Re: new thought experiment: what would you add to Lua ?

tá bom!

I have only been learning Lua for a month. But, tables are really, really cool! So, I don't have much to give except for the following (in order of precedence):

1) It would be great to have a C Unit Test with the Lua C compiler. It should be a C Unit Tester that tests every method. This would be HUGE! And, if the framework is established with the source code, the Community could contribute in creating tests for Lua!

2) Sets -- In page 15 of Programming in Lua, third edition you state, "We use tables to represent ordinary arrays, sets, records, and ...". The one thing that I miss from Pascal in modern programming languages is Pascal's set, especially inside an if statement.

(In Pascal)

Months = (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec);

CurrentMonth := [Sep]

SummerMonths := [Jun, Jul, Aug];

if (CurrentMonth in SummerMonths)

then

end;

Is this possible in Lua? A switch statement would not be needed (in my humble opinion) if an if statement can operate from sets.

3) Switch statement. If sets are allowed in an if statement, I would not go for adding a switch statement. But, if you do, and if you follow C/C++/..., add nobreak keyword. Forcing the programmer to end every case with either a break or nobreak would prevent bad things from happening. A nobreak indicates that you intentionally want to go to the next case. No more missing breaks within a switch statement!

4) Switch statement. If you plan to add a switch statement, but only if you do. I suggest that within the switch() { .. }, you can add variable declarations from the first brace '{' and before the first case statement like this (it would be great to have sets from #2 here also. You will notice a Pascalish case here also):

switch (SummerMonths)

{

temp = "Summer is still ON!"

case Jun..Aug:

print(temp)

otherwise:

print("Where did summer go")

}

5) This was syntactic sugar that I suggested to Microsoft over 10 years ago for their C++/CLI compiler. Instead of:

if (x > y) and (y > z)

can we instead say:

if x > y > z

That's all folks!

Thanks for the opportunity to express my ideas.

As soon as I heard about Lua tables, I knew that this was a language for me to learn.

Boa noite!

In the process of learning Lua,

Richard Green

On 9/14/2018 3:22 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:

i would add support for binary and octal integer literals like
0b1001011 or 0o0755 as in Python and Ruby.

octal integer literals are helpful when working with unix (file)
modes/permissions (which i do frequently).

  function Oo(x) return tonumber(x, 8) end
  function Ob(x) return tonumber(x, 2) end

  print(Ob"1001011")              --> 75
  print(Oo"0755")                 --> 493

:-)

-- Roberto