I like this better. Except for that it uses a table, but this is sweet. The extra parens kind of kill the syntactic beauty of the __call method. If not for that, it'd win in my book.
Other experiments I want to play around with are[1]:
1: Impregnate the table with the Lpeg library. I'm not sure about the sorts of mayhem this would lead to, but it sounds fun.
2: something like ("howdy")["ow"] or ("howdy")["2|"] or whatever... I don't know how python does it, but I'm sure that stealing from there would be wise.
-Andrew
[1] I wonder if discovering that there is a string metatable and that you can play with it is a common rite of passage amongst people who journey through lua...
