nested tables vs flattened

["Brett Bibby" <research@...>]

I looked at the LL3 slides and that got me wondering....  Our game
editor allows the user to create table definitions just like defining C
structs, where a struct can include other structs.  Currently we
"flatten" these nested tables into a single lua table so there's no
nesting of elements.  Is this better (where better means faster runtime
performance) or would it be better to leave the nested tables?  We had
assumed that a direct, flat table element access was faster....
Brett