proxy tables are not fun

["Jay Carlson" <nop@...>]

[Just so nobody assumes that everyone is happy.]

> However, I think this is a strong argument for increasing the ease of
> using proxy tables, since they are a prominent idiom in Lua 5.  

Lua 5 is less fun to program in than Lua 4 because __index forces the use of
proxy objects.  They make my brain hurt, and I'm less likely to provide a
clean interface as a result.  I've been playing with XML again and I found
myself dreading writing a new node wrapper, whereas in Lua 4 I remember
sorta looking forward to that kind of thing.

The lack of "get me a reasonable pairs()-like iterator" in metatables may be
a lot of it.

"Fun" is an important characteristic of software, but I don't know how to
define it.

On the other hand, coroutines are fun.  If you could yield across C stacks,
it would be more fun, but we all understand why it's hard.  But it makes C
callback interfaces like expat hard to wrangle into shape.  (By the way,
expat 1.95.8 supports suspend/resume, which makes pull interfaces more
efficient---anybody going to bind this?)

Jay