Oh, the verbosity can be cured, by borrowing an idea from
Fortran. (To go with origin-1 indexing, the arithmetic "for", etc.)
Give Ravi a function IMPLICIT (capitals, please! like C preprocessor
directives).
IMPLICIT ("integer", "[^I-N]")
If a name matches the pattern, values assigned to it must be
of the indicated type. Ravi would of course not treat IMPLICIT
as a function but as a compiler directive. It's a function to
allow Lua to do nothing.
To make Ravi programs compile under Lua, one can do this:
lua -e "IMPLICIT=load''" xxx.ravi