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

or

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

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,

##License This work is under MIT-LICENSE
Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Roland Yonaba. See LICENSE.