Ternary (conditional) operator. Using (x and y or z) has become an
idiom, which shows the real demand for such a feature, but the fact that
it breaks when y is false or nil makes for a lot of landmines.
Something like #... to return the number of varargs without needing to
pass them all to another function as in select('#',...).
--
Andrew.
I'm a big proponent of NIL_IN_TABLE because it would give us the ability to mimic "sequences" without holes, but most other things I would like to see are syntactic sugar:
- Safe table navigation
- adding to self using "+="
- Ternary conditions
I used to be a proponent of case statements, but the flexibility of "if else" and the consistency of a single pattern for checking values is winning me over. I know ternary conditions breaks that consistency, but it could be worth breaking for the ability to write succinct code.
As a side remark, I've been mucking with C and the intricacies of distributing Lua for so long now, I had almost forgotten what a pleasure it is to *write* Lua. My current distraction/project (a lua minecraft sever controller) has reminded me of the elegance of the language.
Russ
