Lua5 / poor performance

["Kevin Baca" <kbaca@...>]

I'm using lua as a data definition language for a project I'm working
on.

I recently moved from lua4 to lua5 and I've noticed huge loss in
performance in table construction.

My tables are pretty simple:

points=
{
    {0,2,3},
    {1,1,1},
    etc...
}

But they can have thousands of entries.

With 3 such tables of 1700 entries each in one file the file takes close
to 30 seconds to load on a PIII 800.

Note that I tested this using the console interpreter that comes with
the Lua5 distribution.  I simply loaded the tables by typing
dofile("test.lua").  Test.lua does nothing more than create the tables.
No processing is occurring.

Any suggestions?

I can provide the test file if necessary.