Re: Lua 5.1+ and variable-argument tables

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 19-Aug-04, at 7:00 PM, Mark Hamburg wrote:

> Is it correct to summarize functional tuples as being essentially 
> equivalent
> to immutable, pure arrays -- i.e., tables that can't be changed and 
> that
> only have entries from 1 to n for some value of n?
>
> Presumably, one could actually even have mutable tuples. You just can't
> change the number of values in the tuple.

Yes, that would be the proposal.

As I mentioned at the end of the probably-too-long message from earlier 
today, there are some potential optimisations which work better if the 
tuple is immutable. On the other hand, there are probably some 
applications (vector arithmetic springs to mind) which might like to be 
able to update in place. I personally prefer the immutable flavour; but 
it is certainly trivial to implement mutable tuples using the same 
basic architecture, because iirc
lua_replace() works on pseudo-indices.