Re: Making Lua unique through supporting natural language texts as valid script code

[Lars Müller <appgurulars@...>]

1. Programming languages shouldn't use/allow nonprintable characters
except perhaps in (long/raw) string literals.
2. Would break existing code and introduce many syntactic ambiguities.
Consider the simple p = print. Is this an assignment p = print() or an
assignment p = print?
3. Again a nonprintable control character. Adding hyphen would introduce
ambiguities, breaking existing code again: Is a-b the name a-b or the
subtraction a - b?
4. Again ambiguities: Is x=f "blah" the assignment x=f followed by the
comment "blah", or the assignment x=f("blah")?
5. Not an option, would introduce ambiguities and break existing code -
comma, period and colon all already have meanings (arglist / varlist /
table entry separator, indexing operator, implicit self parameter
syntactic sugar). Treating them like semicolons (usually unnecessary
statement delimiters) would break practically all existing code. Some
examples: Is f().x=2 equivalent to f();x=2 or f()["x"]=2? Is f():g()
equivalent to f();g() or local self=f();self.g(self)?

The support of nonprintable characters would be easy to implement, the
rest not so much; it isn't even well defined.

- Lars

On 01/10/2023 13:41, Claudio Grondi wrote:
> Lua would require some minor changes only, which if I am not mistaken
> won't break any past code and should be relatively easy to implement,
> in order to support natural language texts as valid script code.
>
> May someone help me to provide proof of the concept explaining where
> and how to modify Lua C-code in order to:
>
> 1.    allow ASCII values 0x02 (Start of Text) and 0x03 (End of Text)
> to be used in script code and interpreted respectively as `[[` and `]]`
>
> 2.    allow function calls by specifying the function name only
> (without using braces and without the need of passing a parameter)
>
> 3.    extend [_a-zA-z0-9] characters allowed in symbol names with
> ASCII value 0x1F (Unit Separator) and `-` which will be treated like
> [0-9] not allowed as first symbol name characters
>
> 4.    allow usage of unnamed strings (i.e. string literals which can
> be specified anywhere in code without the need of assigning them to a
> symbol) ignoring them like comments
>
> 5.    allow next to `;` also usage of `,` , `.` and `:`
>
> ?