Suggestion regarding the keyword "local"

[AMD-NICK]

I'm not sure if this can be implemented by a plugin for VSCode, as I'm not sure what their capabilities are, but I want to talk about what's annoying me and what would fix it in theory

The "local" keyword problem

I understand that Lua is unlikely to ever get rid of it, but I think the fact that it exists is a fundamental mistake.

In programming, you need to define something local a million times and global 1 time per million. But in reality we have the keyword local instead of global. This leads to clogging the code with a word that might not exist in general.

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Maybe a plugin for vscode could at least just hide the word `local' from the code after it is written, marking the function or variable with some icon instead of that word. That would remove a lot of visual garbage.

[Frityet]

https://lua-users.org/wiki/LocalByDefault

There is a LOT of reasons why it is like this

[carsakiller]

Great post! I ran into the nonlocal keyword in Python before... it isn't wrong, but is very counter-intuitive when coming from just about any other language. I think Lua handles it in a perfectly reasonable way that still allows it to have it's famous low keyword count.

The reasoning provided by Mike Pall is really sound in my opinion:

"'local by default' does not mix well with lexical scoping....Proper lexical scoping really requires that you have a choice between mutating a binding (assignment) and creating a new binding (declaration). Alas, the 'local by default' rule mixes them and makes an assignment do both."

At the end of the day, it is no real different from using var, which is required in many other languages. Modifying this behaviour isn't really the job of the language server, as it would then be its own variant of Lua. That being said, it should be possible for a plugin to allow you to write code without local keywords that can be added back in by the plugin for execution as standard Lua. You will have to solve the assignment/binding problem mentioned above, though, perhaps by adding global and nonlocal.