few syntax improvements

[McIkye]

improve some of the compiler compatibility and get rid of the dead code

[bogdanm]

Hi,

Thanks for your PR. I understand what ed74533 and b62616b are fixing, but I'd rather not modify the original Lua sources unless really needed (becuase that would make applying (and extracting) patches much harder). About 7aa2e45, I'm not sure about its scope, is it fixing an actual problem?

Thanks,
Bogdan

[McIkye]

it removes dependency on locale.h which is not necessarily available on embedded platforms and is not required for the absanse of float numbers

[bogdanm]

That makes sense, thank you. I'll take the commit(s) that remove the dependency on locale.h, but as mentioned before, I'd rather not merge the ones related to toolchain compatibility improvement, or other such commits that change the base Lua code without a very good reason to do so.
I saw that you also added some commits around porting back bitops from Lua 5.3.I believe those are important in an embedded system and I'm willing to allow changing the Lua code because of that, but please issue a separate PR with those changes, this one is getting too big.

[jsnyder]

Two added notes:

1. To make separate pull requests you can put these changes in branches rather than your master branch.

2. For ed74533 and b62616b, I think at least some of these were introduced in some of the patches we applied to the Lua core and the original sources are C89 compliant.

For example: https://github.com/jsnyder/lua/blob/master/src/lapi.c#L926 vs ed74533

That said, I believe what we have is still valid C99. Also the Lua Tiny RAM patches that allow for read-only tables that conserve SRAM are built using designated initializers which bump our compiler requirement up to C99 anyways.