Strictness by Yonaba (original) (raw)

Tracks declaration and assignment of globals in Lua

View the Project on GitHub Yonaba/strictness

strictness

With the Lua programming language, undeclared variables are not detected until runtime, as Lua will not complain when loading code. This is releated to the convention that Lua uses : global by default. In other words, when a variable is not recognized as local, it will be interpreted as a global one, and will involve a lookup in the global environment _G (for Lua 5.1). Note that this behaviour has been removed starting from Lua 5.2, which strictly speaking has no globals, because of its lexical scoping.

strictness is a module to track access and assignment to undefined variables in your code. It enforces to declare globals and modules variables before assigning them values. As such, it helps having a better control on the scope of variables across the code.

strictness is mostly meant to work with Lua 5.1, but it is compatible with newer versions of Lua.

Installation

Git

git clone git://github.com/Yonaba/strictness

Download

See releases

LuaRocks

luarocks install strictness

MoonRocks

moonrocks install strictness

luarocks install strictness --server=http://rocks.moonscript.org strictness

Documentation

See tutorial.md.

Tests

This project has specification tests. To run these tests, execute the following command from the project root folder:

lua spec/tests.lua

Similar projects

Feel free to check those alternate implementations, from with strictness takes some inspiration:

strict.lua which is included in the official Lua 5.1 distribution,
pl.strict which is part of Penlight,