RE: lua hacking wondering

["Vijay Aswadhati" <wyseman@...>]

>> So the question is this: is it worth requesting this
>> as a feature in 5.1?

>>From a confused observer:
>Exactly what are you asking be included?

One of those occasions when following the netiquette (of snipping...) leads
to
confused observers!

To answer your question, the posting was in response to Jeffrey's
posting on his attempts to "'__existingindex' metatable method"
and the patch he provided for discussion which was followed up by
Diego's well meaning "Can't you get away with using a proxy table..."
response.

This was followed by Mark (Hamburg) comments on how he modified Lua to
support a __write metamethod and his remarks about the "standard answer
is to use proxy tables" and some suggestions he had.

My posting was prompted by the above discussion and contemplation
on why what seems to be a common use case (from the many postings
on this news group) can't be provided by the core instead of
everyone (in need) having to patch it.

Which leads nicely to the discussion of the standard philosophy implicit
in this mailing list of how one or two experts in Lua should handle all
the gore and others should just use what these experts decide for them.

I personally have no problems with that line of thought. But it
falls short for systems designers (in small development houses) who are
not experts in a language, whose task is to focus on the "SYSTEM" of which
a scripting language is a subsystem; and would like to carve solutions from
existing components with the least effort and minimal discovery.

While I was writing this up, Ben Sunshine-Hill suggested that I am
perhaps looking for __setindex metamethod; yes, perhaps.

My rambling was more to make use of Jeffrey's post as an opportunity
to bring to the community's attention of a recurring use case - the
use of proxy table, how curiously recurring pattern it seems to be.

And to hear from the community:
- why some developers are going down the path of modifying the core?
- are they right in their approach?
- is it worth reifying this "curiously recurring pattern" as feature
  of 5.1 so that others do not have to touch the core.

Hope that clears up the confusion.

Vijay Aswadhati