I believe the <...> syntax is generally perceived as being noisy and not in line with Lua's otherwise pretty face... can we change it to this:
local my_var close = ...
local my_var const = ...
AFAICS that should not be syntactically ambiguous, and would be worth doing even if it requires breaking code that uses const/close as variable names.
Also keep in mind that, from a general readability point of view, syntax-highlighters would take care of communicating to the user that those are special keywords, no need for <>.
David
