Re: rethinking method calls with __mcall metamethod rather than __index/__call

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

The reason I went for making mcall return the function and its first  
parameter had to do with the underlying behavior of the Lua virtual  
machine and with the needs for implementing method curries. If we  
insist that the SELF opcode always generates the object to call and  
the first parameter to the call, then everything after that is well  
positioned for reasoning about the state of the stack for a call or  
for building a method curry. The __mcall metatable entry is basically  
a way to override this behavior. We could say that it only gets to  
return the item to call, but that seems overly restrictive.

Mark