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Ardren 10 hours ago [-]
> For compatibility with other computer languages, the following classic Lua operators can be written in a more customary syntax:
Why though? What does changing `and` to `&&` actually achieve? Were people confused?
Changing the syntax seems very surface level. It's not actually fixing any problems, just making Lua no longer look like Lua. It's not going to help anyone write/learn Lua. It will make everything more complicated as there are now two ways to do everything.
This feels like adding braces to Python because you don't like indenting your code.
nullpoint420 9 hours ago [-]
> This feels like adding braces to Python because you don't like indenting your code.
Ruby has both kinds of operators as well, and it's fine. The thing in Ruby, though, is that the English logical operators have lower precedence than the symbolic logical operators, so you can use them in place of parentheses. Sometimes that's confusing, other times it can be used to make code very readable.
In general, I would expect symbolic operators to be desirable in complex boolean expressions, because "loud punctuation" stands out among English words when reading the code.
spider-mario 5 hours ago [-]
Same in Perl, hence the good old pattern:
open my $fh, '<', 'input.txt' or die;
codesnik 3 hours ago [-]
yes, ruby inherited this from perl, though 'or' has lower precedence than 'and' in perl, and they're equal in ruby. Which sounds like something going to cause mistakes, but I yet to see 'and' and 'or' together in the same expression in ruby.
ClikeX 3 hours ago [-]
I've always found it odd that and/or in Ruby isn't just considered equal to &&/||, and I have never really used the english operators except for the usual modifiers like if and unless.
What is a practical use case where the lower precedence makes sense?
doophus 8 hours ago [-]
> Why though? What does changing `and` to `&&` actually achieve? Were people confused?
Also consider AI, that has a greater training base of JavaScript than Lua. So making Lua look more like JS, should improve output and reduce mistakes.
lionkor 7 hours ago [-]
No, don't consider AI.
boxed 7 hours ago [-]
AI has greater training on Python, which uses `and` and `or`, and it has absolutely no issue keeping that straight.
5 hours ago [-]
Heliodex 12 hours ago [-]
A comment <https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/1475#issuecomment-47...> has already been made on the issue regarding the ternary operator, recommending `if x then y else z` over `x ? y : z`. This is exactly how it's done with if-then-else expressions in Luau <https://luau.org/syntax/#if-then-else-expressions>, another language compatible with Lua, and makes it a ton easier to nest (especially with elseif) and I believe still easier to read than `y if x else z`.
noelwelsh 6 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I don't understand why people think the ternary operator is needed when you can just make `if` an expression instead of a statement. Then there is no new syntax to learn and `if` just becomes more useful.
mjcohen 12 hours ago [-]
The ternary operator is easy to nest if you put each clause on a separate line. Then it looks just like nested if-then-else.
edoceo 12 hours ago [-]
I love the ternary operator as much as anyone. But dang if it doesn't get hard to read when there is are a few, nested even.
Does that operator compile to faster assembly that if I make the same logic with verbose `if` logic? Is that a language specific outcome?
if cond1 then res1
else if cond2 then res2
else if cond3 then res3
else or_else_res
or
if cond1 then res1
elif cond2 then res2
elif cond3 then res3
else or_else_res
what is most lua-like?
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
I find that so much harder to read compared to if/else or case/when in ruby.
The ? is basically an attempt to use fewer if/else, at the cost of condensed if-else like structure. I always need to look at both parts after the ? whereas in a single if or elsif I don't. case/when in ruby is even better here e. g. regex check:
def foo(i)
case i
when /^cat/
handle_cats
when /^dog/
handle_dogs
(I ommitted the "end"s here to just focus on the conditional logic.)
spider-mario 5 hours ago [-]
Unless you mess up its associativity, like PHP until 7.4.
LuaJIT has held back the lua ecosystem for over a decade. There's no reason to not at least try to move the implementation closer to luau or puc lua, not create yet more incompatible syntax
kzrdude 24 minutes ago [-]
I don't think Lua is your average ecosystem. Lua is used as an embedded interpreter. For example, Neovim doesn't want to change its configuration language's syntax just because there is a new version of Lua available.
On the contrary, we can claim that luajit has stabilized lua for implementations and for users (strengthening Lua 5.1 dominance, which makes the experience more homogenous across apps).
Looks like LuaJIT is catching up, but calling these "syntax extensions" is confusing. Is the intent to hold LuaJIT fixed against some earlier Lua version (I guess 5.1) and adopt newer syntax piecemeal?
I welcome the compound assignment operators. Playdate's version of Lua also has that extension.
orthoxerox 7 hours ago [-]
LuaJIT is an involuntary fork of 5.1. It already had various extensions that conflicted with the 5.2 implementation of the same features, and Mike Pall made it clear on the mailing list he wasn't going to change how LuaJIT worked.
pansa2 13 hours ago [-]
So is LuaJIT resuming active development after a decade or so of only maintenance? Great!
A lot of these changes make sense (although some of them are a bit too TIMTOWTDI for my taste) - but perhaps LuaJIT 3 would benefit from a change of name as well? Certainly with all these changes, it would be more like a separate language than merely a JIT-compiled version of Lua.
orthoxerox 7 hours ago [-]
A bunch of them are from Luau, the Roblox fork of Lua and the dialect most young programmers know. Adding them to LuaJIT will make it easier to write for both Zoomers and AI agents, who have been exposed to a lot of Luau code.
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
I know the LuaJIT maintainer(s?) will never add it because it's too radical a departure from Lua but I wish they would include Luau's type annotations. There are typed languages like Teal that will compile to Lua that should work (although I've had a difficult time getting Teal to work with cdefs) and you can kind of fake it by using C structs obviously but having such a feature be native to Lua itself would be nice.
201984 13 hours ago [-]
>TIMTOWTDI
What on earth is this supposed to mean?
Twirrim 13 hours ago [-]
There Is More Than One Way To Do It.
That takes me back a bit. It's a perl-ism. I used to think it was a great design feature but I've come to strongly prefer "There should be one way to do it, and it should be obvious"
BobBagwill 10 minutes ago [-]
TCBOO, AKA, the Highlander Conjecture.
201984 13 hours ago [-]
Interesting, thank you.
ncruces 4 hours ago [-]
Using acronyms is one of those ways. /s
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
There is more than one way to do it.
11 hours ago [-]
camgunz 7 hours ago [-]
One of the interesting things about Lua is because they don't really maintain compatibility between major versions, there isn't a huge ecosystem, and as a result there's less friction against making your own, slightly incompatible version. When you add on the simplicity of implementing the language, it's created a really diverse set of lua-alikes. Weird (and cool) for a language to have a diverse ecosystem of implementations, but not necessarily libraries.
ianm218 11 hours ago [-]
Tangently related but I’ve been deep in Lua recently working on a rust implementation that supports Lua 5.1-5.5 in one Rust Binary https://github.com/ianm199/omnilua.
My ultimate goal was to support LuaJIT in Rust as well but this does not make it easier.
valorzard 8 hours ago [-]
Also, one issue I have with this repo is that, since so much of it seems to use Claude, as an actual human I struggle to read and parse any of the information.
In a mix of official and unofficial benchmarks wall clock performance is ~1.4x as fast as C Lua and the memory usage is ~1.7x.
So performance is worse to be clear but within range. There’s some performance improvements I haven’t gone for yet that would get it down to ~1.1 I think.
lifthrasiir 9 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, seriously, I always thought Lua should have been like this. The 5.1/5.2/5.3+ split was so painful.
> My ultimate goal was to support LuaJIT in Rust as well but this does not make it easier.
I think you could stop right before the syntax extension.
genxy 10 hours ago [-]
This is amazing! Can a program call across versions? Like could we take a Lua 5.1 codebase and upgrade only a portion of it at a time to a new Lua version?
valorzard 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ricardobeat 13 hours ago [-]
I see JavaScript.
Some of these really look like QoL improvements. I'm not convinced ternary statements are an ergonomic improvement in particular. The examples given don't make a compelling case, 'visually tidy' is not the same as readable.
nine_k 12 hours ago [-]
Worse, I see C (as in ! or &&), and Perl (as in manifestly more than one way to do it).
There are real improvements though, such as ?. and ??= that help with default-nullable everything.
Ternary is very useful, but it I'd rather see it implemented idiomatically:
pos += (if forward then +1 else -1)
Structural pattern-matching could be fantastic, but no syntax is suggested.
2 hours ago [-]
jsomedon 5 hours ago [-]
I kinda have seen somewhere on internet, that the language design of lua and js(well, ecmascript to be precise) is somehow related. But can't really find the exact reference I have seen.. it was long time ago when I read this.
cygx 3 hours ago [-]
There's some overlap in the languages they were inspired by (eg Scheme, or the chains Modula -> Lua vs Modula -> Java -> Javascript), but as far as I'm aware, the original designs were made independently.
Now, the object systems do look similar, but that seems to be a case of convergent evolution: Javascript took direct inspiration from Self, whereas Lua's system is based on a more generic fallback mechanism for table access.
fluoridation 6 hours ago [-]
Lua to me always felt very JavaScripty, just with a different syntax.
drdexebtjl 34 minutes ago [-]
Lua predates JavaScript by about 2 years though.
3eb7988a1663 13 hours ago [-]
Never will I understand ternary operators. As soon as you introduce it, some chuckle heads want to use them everywhere. Worse if the syntax allows nested ternarys. I guess it keeps the language open for code golfing, but it otherwise seems like redundant syntax that at best saves a few characters.
demilicious 13 hours ago [-]
That’s why “if” should just be an expression
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
This is the best answer in my opinion. Ternary is just sugar for an expressive if. LuaJIT seems to be focusing on adding new syntax though, maintainer might not be amenable to updating existing semantics.
wavemode 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think if-expressions have to affect existing semantics. Basically, in the parser you would have two different kinds of AST nodes, one for when the `if` keyword is encountered in statement position and another for when it's encountered in expression position.
Right now, `if` in expression position is just a syntax error ("unexpected symbol")
Joker_vD 9 hours ago [-]
Well, I believe there could be some complications with parsing related to the fact that Lua grammar doesn't really requires semicolons between the statements.
But other than that, yeah, detecting "if" in the expression position is pretty unambiguous. No idea why most languages went with "cond-expr ? then-expr : else-expr" bracketed syntax instead.
_flux 8 hours ago [-]
Surely the most likely explanation is familiary from C?
But e.g. ml-family languages (like OCaml, F#, Haskell) and Rust just have the *if* expression that has a non-void value. If your language accepts expressions as statements (most do?), then I think that should just be compatible out of the box.
Joker_vD 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, but why C had that syntax? Oh, right, because it didn't use if-then[-else]-end for the conditional statement, and reusing if(cond)[-else] with prohibited braces would be awkward.
Oh, and Lua most famously does not accept expressions as statements. Which, now that I think of it, would actually evade most of the parsing complications.
NuclearPM 11 hours ago [-]
Yep. Everything should be.
201984 13 hours ago [-]
Lua basically already has ternary operators anyway since "and" and "or" short circuit. I also don't see the need of adding additional syntax for it.
local x = condition ? value_a : value b
local x = condition and value_a or value_b
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
> The classic Lua idiom a and b or c has a pitfall when b is nil or false: then c is returned, even when a is truthy.
> E.g. true and false or 42 returns 42, whereas true ? false : 42 returns the (expected) false.
Gualdrapo 13 hours ago [-]
I guess for the JS case it makes sense to be able to shave a few characters for file shrinking purposes, but generally I'm more biased to code clarity and "self-explainability"
NuclearPM 11 hours ago [-]
That’s what compression is for.
hiccuphippo 13 hours ago [-]
I find it most useful in languages that have non-mutable variables and you want to avoid a mutable variable or an extra function when the value comes from a simple condition.
I'm proud of it and thankfull to the Lua/Luajit projects.
HexDecOctBin 8 hours ago [-]
It might have been better to publicly document and stabilise the LuaJIT bytecode, which would allow people to then come up with whatever syntax they wanted in their own custom frontends.
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
Looks like LuaJIT is really going to fork away from Lua this time. After these changes, it won't be a compatible Lua 5.1 implementation anymore, it will be a new language.
So shouldn't it have a new name?
orthoxerox 7 hours ago [-]
Why won't it be compatible? Any code written in Lua 5.1 will run on LuaJIT.
ulbu 9 hours ago [-]
well, it doesn’t say Lua5.1-JIT
a_t48 12 hours ago [-]
It could be opt in.
sourcegrift 12 hours ago [-]
Are there any rough estimates on popularity of lua implementations? At this point it feels lua means luajit
latenightcoding 12 hours ago [-]
not even close, because there are a lot of places where you can't run LuaJIT
tuvix 11 hours ago [-]
Where can you not run LuaJIT? Genuinely curious
Boxxed 10 hours ago [-]
Wasm and platforms like iOS and Nintendo Switch (I think).
extrememacaroni 10 hours ago [-]
anywhere that does not allow self modifying code such as app stores.
Dylan16807 9 hours ago [-]
LuaJIT is not just a JIT, it also includes high speed interpreters for x86, Arm, and more.
spankalee 9 hours ago [-]
They shouldn't add the ternary operator, it keeps `?` from being usable on it's own for safe navigation and requires the ugly `?.` operator, like `a?.[b]` or `f?.()` instead of `a?[b]` or `f?()`.
orphea 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. This is awful:
obj?.:method(…)
bawolff 13 hours ago [-]
+= and ..= are things i find i'm constantly missing in lua.
Personally im a fan of introducing ternaranary operator in lua. Everyone uses `x and y or z` as a ternanary which i find way more confusing than ?:
linzhangrun 8 hours ago [-]
Lua pursues "simplicity, purity, and simplicity." So... too much syntactic sugar is unlikely
pseudony 10 hours ago [-]
Seems like a bad idea to actively diverge from Lua, hostile even, especially without at least a clear change of name.
3 hours ago [-]
linzhangrun 13 hours ago [-]
I thought luajit had completely stopped feature updates
le-mark 13 hours ago [-]
I’m confused I thought Mike Pall left luajit and Laurence Tratt took over as maintainer?
dang 12 hours ago [-]
Mike Pall is to LuaJIT as PG is to Hacker News.
Edit: meaning he can come back anytime.
misiek08 4 hours ago [-]
He left for a break, returned and there was no second break or anything.
I don't want to spam it in repo, so leaving it here: he is kind of a hero doing this work and I (hopefully we) am very grateful for his contribution to this world.
swah 3 hours ago [-]
Are there great uses of LuaJIT out there? It was such a big thing before fast JS engines IIRC.
larrry 12 hours ago [-]
I would love to see all of these come to LuaJIT (and love2d to support the new version too). It’s nice that Lua is simple, the syntax changes should hopefully make Lua code even simpler to read too
Rohansi 12 hours ago [-]
> It’s nice that Lua is simple, the syntax changes should hopefully make Lua code even simpler to read too
But which Lua?
Lua as implemented by LuaJIT is a fork of the language at this point. It's not fully compatible with PUC Lua (the reference implementation) and LuaJIT does not support features from the latest Lua version.
NuclearPM 11 hours ago [-]
LuaJIT of course.
childintime 6 hours ago [-]
> local gauge = direction == "up" ? count + 10 : count - 10
I imagine these changes make the original Lua adepts think their training wheels have come off. The language now looks like any other. That's a good thing to me, and it will help with the adoption of the JIT, but the whole language could have been syntax modernized as a result. But.. when the work is done someone else can fork it into something independent from its Lua roots.
From that perspective the conditional operator seems defensible, where it would be feature creep otherwise, as it is generally unloved elsewhere.
flumpcakes 9 hours ago [-]
Is LuaJIT still based on Lua5.1? I wonder why they haven't followed the language spec up to Lua5.5.
radiator 8 hours ago [-]
Because they don't like the changes, to put it mildly.
freestanding 2 hours ago [-]
extensions are detachable/optional, those arent extensions but features
8 hours ago [-]
kibwen 12 hours ago [-]
Please don't, inscrutable bitwise operators are an accident of the past even in systems languages, let alone in a scripting language. I'm not against infix operators for bitwise operations, just please spell them out with keywords rather than giving them sigils.
Likewise, going from `and` and `or` to `&&` and `||` would be a dispiriting regression. This is something that Zig got right.
Dylan16807 9 hours ago [-]
What kind of person understands and needs bitwise operators but can't easily remember & | ~ and the arrows for shift? It's very little information.
The part I'd call a hassle is the different kinds of right shift but you have that same hassle if you use keywords.
I like using the and/or keywords for logical operations. Now let's make bitwise look significantly different from that.
Mond_ 8 hours ago [-]
It's not about having to remember them, it's that you shouldn't waste these short single symbols on operations that are only rarely used.
This stuff (especially the ternary) are a step backwards. There is just no reason to waste | on a bitwise or that gets used at 1% of the frequency of the standard or. In the future you might have a better use for it (pipeline syntax, sum or union types come to mind in other languages).
I dislike basically everything about these syntax extensions.
I'm going to disagree only because one of the primary use cases for LuaJIT is interop with C and I think there's a case for making the ergonomics match.
JSR_FDED 12 hours ago [-]
What’s the Lua/LuaJIT story these days for bundling up all the scripts of an application into a single file? Is there a way to do the super convenient go-like thing?
zdragnar 11 hours ago [-]
There's a bunch of options from a Google search, but embedding it in a thin C program and building that with https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan would be a pretty go-like experience, I'd think.
gucci-on-fleek 11 hours ago [-]
I personally use a hand-written C wrapper program (which is not much more than a dozen lines long), and then embed the Lua scripts using objdump. This isn't quite as easy as Go since cross-compiling C programs is often somewhat tricky, but Lua is very portable and has zero dependencies, so it's usually not too hard.
orthoxerox 7 hours ago [-]
There was a Lua[JIT] fork called Idle that seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth that did exactly that: it would take a small stub program, a runtime library and all the scripts and package them into a single PE/COFF binary that would read itself when run.
Love2D does it as well:
zip -9 -r SuperGame.love .
cat love.exe SuperGame.love > SuperGame.exe
This doesn't work with ELF files, though.
JSR_FDED 12 hours ago [-]
Cool to see this - ergonomic syntax will make it easier to recommend Lua. Hope the PUC team aligns with this.
Also, I love this kind of pragmatism:
> Exponentiation assignment a ^= b has been deliberately omitted to avoid a predictable pitfall: this is how xor assignment is written in most other computer languages. Also, a syntax for exponentiation assignment is rarely asked for.
A ‘defer’ for closing files or deleting temp files at the end of a script will make life more enjoyable.
10 hours ago [-]
yxhuvud 7 hours ago [-]
In aggregate this looks like a godsend, but there are some examples (like foo?.:method) that looks atrocious.
Ciantic 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, "?." as safe navigation operator even in JS where it already exists is eye-sore. They could use some other single character instead of two characters. Question mark is already doing a lot with ternaries etc.
Instead of obj?.:method?.(…) it would be like obj#:method#(…)
Replace # with your favorite extra character instead of questionmark.
JBits 1 hours ago [-]
Is there any reason why they're not considering a single '?' like rust? Is it a parsing issue?
So you'd have: obj?:method(…)
sourcegrift 12 hours ago [-]
What are some pragmatic embedded scripting languages of choice these days if one has to consider:
1) Ease of learning, ideally minimal deviant behaviour (eg i consider lua tables to be a new concept in itself)
2) Reasonably fast. Not as much as lua jit but even half would be good enough
3) Mature
4) Has Rust bindings
NuclearPM 11 hours ago [-]
Lua. Lua tables are easy and awesome. My hobby language unites Lua tables with functions too.
kevinten10 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
Lua has a lot of useless syntax. For instance, the "then". I have been using ruby and python for many years. Lua is living in the old age here.
That's just one example of so many more. I get that lua occupies a useful niche with its focus on embedded systems, but lua is not really a well-designed language in general. JavaScript has a similar problem.
xonre 8 hours ago [-]
For readability, `then` allows splitting with newlines very long conditional expressions, without having to wrap the condition in parentheses:
if x + y + z > a
or verylongconditionalhere ()
or anotherverylongconditionalhere ()
then
...
after `if` and `elseif` the parser simply goes on until it finds `then`.
Dylan16807 9 hours ago [-]
Python spells "then" as ":"
In Ruby you can choose between "then" and a newline.
Why though? What does changing `and` to `&&` actually achieve? Were people confused?
Changing the syntax seems very surface level. It's not actually fixing any problems, just making Lua no longer look like Lua. It's not going to help anyone write/learn Lua. It will make everything more complicated as there are now two ways to do everything.
This feels like adding braces to Python because you don't like indenting your code.
Now this I can get behind...
In general, I would expect symbolic operators to be desirable in complex boolean expressions, because "loud punctuation" stands out among English words when reading the code.
What is a practical use case where the lower precedence makes sense?
Also consider AI, that has a greater training base of JavaScript than Lua. So making Lua look more like JS, should improve output and reduce mistakes.
Does that operator compile to faster assembly that if I make the same logic with verbose `if` logic? Is that a language specific outcome?
The ? is basically an attempt to use fewer if/else, at the cost of condensed if-else like structure. I always need to look at both parts after the ? whereas in a single if or elsif I don't. case/when in ruby is even better here e. g. regex check:
(I ommitted the "end"s here to just focus on the conditional logic.)https://wiki.php.net/rfc/ternary_associativity
http://phpsadness.com/sad/30
On the contrary, we can claim that luajit has stabilized lua for implementations and for users (strengthening Lua 5.1 dominance, which makes the experience more homogenous across apps).
https://www.lua.org/versions.html#5.3
https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.4.2
Looks like LuaJIT is catching up, but calling these "syntax extensions" is confusing. Is the intent to hold LuaJIT fixed against some earlier Lua version (I guess 5.1) and adopt newer syntax piecemeal?
I welcome the compound assignment operators. Playdate's version of Lua also has that extension.
A lot of these changes make sense (although some of them are a bit too TIMTOWTDI for my taste) - but perhaps LuaJIT 3 would benefit from a change of name as well? Certainly with all these changes, it would be more like a separate language than merely a JIT-compiled version of Lua.
What on earth is this supposed to mean?
That takes me back a bit. It's a perl-ism. I used to think it was a great design feature but I've come to strongly prefer "There should be one way to do it, and it should be obvious"
My ultimate goal was to support LuaJIT in Rust as well but this does not make it easier.
For example, what’s the performance like?
In a mix of official and unofficial benchmarks wall clock performance is ~1.4x as fast as C Lua and the memory usage is ~1.7x.
So performance is worse to be clear but within range. There’s some performance improvements I haven’t gone for yet that would get it down to ~1.1 I think.
> My ultimate goal was to support LuaJIT in Rust as well but this does not make it easier.
I think you could stop right before the syntax extension.
Some of these really look like QoL improvements. I'm not convinced ternary statements are an ergonomic improvement in particular. The examples given don't make a compelling case, 'visually tidy' is not the same as readable.
There are real improvements though, such as ?. and ??= that help with default-nullable everything.
Ternary is very useful, but it I'd rather see it implemented idiomatically:
Structural pattern-matching could be fantastic, but no syntax is suggested.Now, the object systems do look similar, but that seems to be a case of convergent evolution: Javascript took direct inspiration from Self, whereas Lua's system is based on a more generic fallback mechanism for table access.
Right now, `if` in expression position is just a syntax error ("unexpected symbol")
But other than that, yeah, detecting "if" in the expression position is pretty unambiguous. No idea why most languages went with "cond-expr ? then-expr : else-expr" bracketed syntax instead.
But e.g. ml-family languages (like OCaml, F#, Haskell) and Rust just have the *if* expression that has a non-void value. If your language accepts expressions as statements (most do?), then I think that should just be compatible out of the box.
Oh, and Lua most famously does not accept expressions as statements. Which, now that I think of it, would actually evade most of the parsing complications.
> E.g. true and false or 42 returns 42, whereas true ? false : 42 returns the (expected) false.
I'm proud of it and thankfull to the Lua/Luajit projects.
So shouldn't it have a new name?
Personally im a fan of introducing ternaranary operator in lua. Everyone uses `x and y or z` as a ternanary which i find way more confusing than ?:
Edit: meaning he can come back anytime.
I don't want to spam it in repo, so leaving it here: he is kind of a hero doing this work and I (hopefully we) am very grateful for his contribution to this world.
But which Lua?
Lua as implemented by LuaJIT is a fork of the language at this point. It's not fully compatible with PUC Lua (the reference implementation) and LuaJIT does not support features from the latest Lua version.
local gauge = count + (direction == "up" ? 10 : -10)
I imagine these changes make the original Lua adepts think their training wheels have come off. The language now looks like any other. That's a good thing to me, and it will help with the adoption of the JIT, but the whole language could have been syntax modernized as a result. But.. when the work is done someone else can fork it into something independent from its Lua roots.
From that perspective the conditional operator seems defensible, where it would be feature creep otherwise, as it is generally unloved elsewhere.
Likewise, going from `and` and `or` to `&&` and `||` would be a dispiriting regression. This is something that Zig got right.
The part I'd call a hassle is the different kinds of right shift but you have that same hassle if you use keywords.
I like using the and/or keywords for logical operations. Now let's make bitwise look significantly different from that.
This stuff (especially the ternary) are a step backwards. There is just no reason to waste | on a bitwise or that gets used at 1% of the frequency of the standard or. In the future you might have a better use for it (pipeline syntax, sum or union types come to mind in other languages).
I dislike basically everything about these syntax extensions.
[1] https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/operator_alternativ...
Love2D does it as well: zip -9 -r SuperGame.love . cat love.exe SuperGame.love > SuperGame.exe
This doesn't work with ELF files, though.
Also, I love this kind of pragmatism:
> Exponentiation assignment a ^= b has been deliberately omitted to avoid a predictable pitfall: this is how xor assignment is written in most other computer languages. Also, a syntax for exponentiation assignment is rarely asked for.
A ‘defer’ for closing files or deleting temp files at the end of a script will make life more enjoyable.
Instead of obj?.:method?.(…) it would be like obj#:method#(…)
Replace # with your favorite extra character instead of questionmark.
So you'd have: obj?:method(…)
1) Ease of learning, ideally minimal deviant behaviour (eg i consider lua tables to be a new concept in itself)
2) Reasonably fast. Not as much as lua jit but even half would be good enough
3) Mature
4) Has Rust bindings
That's just one example of so many more. I get that lua occupies a useful niche with its focus on embedded systems, but lua is not really a well-designed language in general. JavaScript has a similar problem.
In Ruby you can choose between "then" and a newline.
This is very pot calling the kettle black.