Re: Final optional expression

[Andrew Yan <aky26@...>]

Yikes, that's a no-go then. 

Thanks,

Andrew

On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 3:54 PM David Sicilia <dpsicilia@gmail.com> wrote:

I believe that theoretically it might change the behavior of existing code, since if you have the following:

```

function foo()

  assert(do_something())

end

```

Let's say that `do_something` returns a boolean indicating success or failure, and that result is asserted on.  But assert returns its argument, so now that assert line is returning a value, which would then be returned from the function since it is the last _expression_ in the function, kind of like `1`.  So previously the function returns nothing, and now with your feature it returns true (when it returns).

David

On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 3:30 PM Andrew Yan <aky26@cornell.edu> wrote:

In Lua 5.3, this code is unparseable:

```

function huh() 1 end

```

Would it be possible in future versions of Lua to instead make it return `1` when called, i.e. to permit a final optional _expression_? AFAIK this wouldn't break anything since the above statement can't be parsed anyways.

Proposed example:

```

function huh() 1 end

print(huh()) -- prints 1

```

The motivation for this is lua configuration files.

Example:

`conf.lua`

```

-- statements...

{

option1=1;

option2=2;

}

```

The desired process is that the above block would be `load`ed and operated on.

As of current the above code block does not parse, and it would be nice if it did.

Previous discussion I found:

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2001-04/msg00264.html

Thanks,

Andrew