Re: Binary and octal literals not currently supported by lua

[Tomas Mudrunka <mudrunka@...>]

> There is nothing wrong with this approach, quite the opposite. Just
> two details:
>
> - You can write b'00101010' instead of b('00101010').
>
> - You can use 'tonumber' to do the conversion.

Thanks for your insight, i will use this wrapper (tostring() is optional 
or even redundant) as a workaround:

function b(str); return tonumber(tostring(str),2); end;

> About performance, as with most constants in programs, it is good
> practice to predefine them, so that these conversions are done
> only once for each constant.
>
> -- Roberto

Exactly. That is why i think it would make sense to have support for 
binary literals directly in Lua.

To make it clear i use Lua embedded in C software to provide some 
flexibility and scripting to users. The overall design is such that 
there is no place for user to predefine constants outside of the Lua 
script which gets called from C loop quite often including such base 
conversion in each cycle. So i think it would be bit faster if this gets 
converted when script gets parsed (or compiled) rather than during 
execution.

Also it seems it would make sense to keep the syntax symmetric. eg.:

0xFF and 0b11111111
rather than
0xFF and b'11111111'

That just triggers my OCD :-)

--
S pozdravem
Best regards
     Tomáš Mudruňka - SPOJE.NET s.r.o.