Re: Function source

[alan@... (Alan Watson)]

I have been thinking about writing a replacement for lua_getobjname
that scans tables recursively as well as globals. I want to use this
to print better function names in error messages.

It just occured to me that a nicer alternative would be very simple
with the kind of function method that has been discussed. What I would
do is extract the function name of a function as it is compiled, and
keep a table of these names; lua_getobjname becomes, for functions at
least, a simple table access.

Actually, I would not need quite such a general function method.
Anticipating 3.1, I could do with one that took a function name and a
closure, so that:

    function aaa         (...) ... end
    function aaa.bbb     (...) ... end
    function aaa.bbb.ccc (...) ... end

would become:

    functionmethod(function (...) ... end, "aaa")
    functionmethod(function (...) ... end, "aaa", "bbb")
    functionmethod(function (...) ... end, "aaa", "bbb", "ccc")
   
The draw backs that I can see are that functions would then never be
garbage collected and, I think, my method would never see functions
defined in pre-compiled chunks.

Just a thought.

Alan