It was thus said that the Great Egor Skriptunoff once stated:
Starting with version 5.3 Lua has lost its simplicity (the most attractive
side of Lua). Now you are doomed to always be wary of the difference
between numeric subtypes. Integers in Lua are now forever, there is no way
back to almost perfect Lua 5.2.
So why not just stick to using Lua 5.2? The useful string.pack() and
string.unpack() could be backported (I find those two routines extemely
useful for what I do), and the utf8 library could also be backported if you
need it.
-spc
