User talk:Shlomo

Commentary in examples

Hi. I saw your edits to the Lua example for Hello world/Text. You noted "RC is not a Lua tutorial". I'd like to disagree; while Rosetta Code is not literally a tutorial, it is most certainly a resource for introducing people to programming languages they are unfamiliar with. I think the best examples are those which include commentary on their use of their language's features.

I considered reverting your edit, but I did not do so since you claim that the text was also incorrect, and I do not recall enough Lua to know how to correct it. If you could add a correct description, I would appreciate it (but you are by no means obligated to do so).

(Disclaimers: (1) This comment is partly motivated by defense of examples-with-commentary I have myself written; I prefer they not become unwelcome on RC. (2) I happen to be an administrator, but I do not set RC policy; this is strictly my opinion as a contributor.)

—Kevin Reid 18:10, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi Kevin, thanks for being nice while I was a bit blunt.

Regarding commentary not becoming unwelcome on RC, I was just showing my lack of experience here by my comment. However, I felt the commentary as it was was out of place in the Hello world example, where most languages just have some subtle variation on print("Goodbye World").

That it "works with Lua 5.1.1" is unremarkable, as it would have worked since the first release (v1.1, 1994).
Having two separate versions, one with parens and one without, and a comment, just seems unnecessary. Since omitting the parens is a syntactic sugar which a minority of languages have, I'd prefer the "without" version, but per your comment I'll revert deleting that particular comment (but with corrections).

--Shlomo 21:40, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

If it would have worked with any version, just remove the “works with”. It's meant to act as a (minor) warning to people to be careful with versioning. –Donal Fellows 06:41, 8 May 2012 (UTC)