Niche languages seem to end up with insane quirks like this every time. It's like the tragedy of sisyphus that things like lua exist, but instead of using it directly or modifying it slightly, then having a dead simple, tight, small, elegant, consistent language, people reinvent the wheel and never make it round.
Lua is not perfect either. Having a specific keyword to make variables local was a mistake. Variables should be local by default. Oh, and 1-indexed arrays are annoying.
Both of these could be changed trivially. Someone familiar with lua could do both in one day as opposed to making an entire brand new language from scratch.
