Global-by-default scoping was one of Lua's largest mistakes. I wish they'd fix it, but of course it would break backwards compat.

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drcxd 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Strictly speaking, Lua is not global by default. All free names, that is, all names unqualified with `local`, is actually indexed from a table `_ENV`, which is set to `_G`, the global environment. So, all free names are effectively global by default, but you can change this behavior by put this line at the top of your file `local _G = _G; _ENV = {};`. This way, all free names are indexed from this new table, and all access to the global names must explicitly be accessed through `_G`, which is a local variable now. However, I have never seen such practice. Maybe it is just too complicated to accept that all free names are global variables and you have to explicitly make it local.

	▲	Fwirt 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks to Lua’s great metaprogramming facilities, and the fact that _G is just a table, another workaround is to add a metamethod to _G that throws an error if you try to declare a global. That way you can still declare globals using rawset if you really want them, but it prevents you from declaring them accidentally in a function body.

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kanbankaren 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

yeah. I hate typing `local` for every variable. I would prefer they introduce some syntactic sugar like `let`(to mean local variable) and `const`(to mean local and constant).

	▲	otikik 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“local” is the same as the “let” that you are describing, isn’t it? Just 2 chars longer.