The parent isn't arguing for local by default, just against global by default. I...

catwell · on Oct 2, 2013

I tend to agree with you, but here is the reasoning behind how Lua works:

- local by default weakens what you can do with the scope;

- we want something by default because the language is used for things like configuration files.

The 2nd point means this must be valid:

    param_1 = "foo"
    param_2 = "bar"

I would personally be happy to sacrifice that feature and add an explicit "global" keyword but not everybody agrees, and it would break a lot of code.

What we do instead is use two kinds of tools: static global detectors and strictures (like in Perl). Similar tools are integrated in IDEs as well.

With these tools, I have never had an issue with scoping in code I have written. But it takes a little time to get used to it.

icambron · on Oct 6, 2013

> I would personally be happy to sacrifice that feature and add an explicit "global" keyword but not everybody agrees, and it would break a lot of code.

For sure. That ship has probably sailed. And, like you said, linters alleviate a lot of that pain. But that's a separate question from, "is this a good language feature?"