Re: avoiding recursion in a dump_table function

[Fabien <fleutot+lua@...>]

This dumper handles recursion as well as shared sub-structures, on keys and on values; it produces valid Lua code, and the code is as simple as one could expect when there's no shared sub-structure:

https://github.com/fab13n/metalua/blob/master/src/lib/serialize.lua

As for the "seen-it table" vs. visiting stack approach questioned by David Favro, the reason to go with the "seen-it" approach are:

• it's very simple in a language where tables support arbitrary keys;
• it's good enough for most actual use cases;
• it allows to detect not only cycles, but also shared sub-trees. You might or might not be interested into handling shared sub-trees in a special way, but you certainly want to be protected against them: it's easy to create structures which contain no cycle, but take an exponential time to walk through, and will exhaust your RAM without being detected by a node stack.