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  • 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?

    by matheusmoreira
  • 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.
    by 3eb7988a1663
  • 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.

    by ricardobeat
  • 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.

    by ianm218
  • > 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.

    by Ardren
  • Lua 5.3 (2015-01-12) added the bitwise operators:

    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.

    by omoikane
  • 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.

    by pansa2
  • 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`.
    by Heliodex

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