Re: [Proposal] Simplified Lua Reference

[Marcus Mason <m4gicks@...>]

The reference manual is the technical specification of the language system. There is no other document that goes into those details. A BNF grammar (or any other unambiguous* way of describing a syntax) belongs in such a place.

If you wish to write/propose what amounts to a cheat sheet/quick start (no negative connotations implied here) for people who just want to know quickly a few things to write some code no one would object, I believe a lot of languages nowadays use that to basically advertise to potential users.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 2:03 PM Soni "They/Them" L. <fakedme@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2020-09-21 9:48 a.m., Marcus Mason wrote:
> I do not mean this to sound rude in any way but the reference manual
> is for people who understand programming. A lot of the content is very
> technical and this is why there are other resources such as
> Programming in Lua available for people who want to learn the
> language. Perhaps a modernization of some of lua's resources like the
> wiki could help ease newer people into understanding / learning the
> syntax more easily.

Programming in Lua is written for ppl who can follow tutorials, it
doesn't work for a whole bunch of other ppl.

Stripping the reference manual down to the bare minimum, with no BNF
requirements, would help those ppl.

>
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 5:24 PM Soni "They/Them" L. <fakedme@gmail.com
> <mailto:fakedme@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     The Lua reference manual includes things like BNF everywhere and some
>     stuff like "they can be used to represent ordinary arrays, lists,
>     symbol
>     tables, sets, records, graphs, trees, etc."
>
>     It seems like a good idea to have a reference manual that
>     translates the
>     BNF to english in a way that's easy for someone who doesn't know
>     programming to understand, and maybe omits things like the above, as
>     they add unnecessary complexity.
>
>     And arguably the stuff like "they can be used to represent ordinary
>     arrays, lists, symbol tables, sets, records, graphs, trees, etc."
>     isn't
>     a good fit for a reference manual anyway, but mainly this is about
>     the BNF.
>