Re: Lua design : why no lists ?

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

Lua actually already has lists reasonably well covered. Or at least
vectors/arrays based on its optimization of storing integer keyed values if
sufficiently dense in a range starting at 1 in a data allocation without
keys.

What Lua doesn't support as efficiently are sets where there are a number of
keys to hash but the values are all "true".

If space were really a concern, this would be an interesting argument for
providing a way for userdata to contain references to Lua values. Or at the
very least, one could expose a hash function which takes a Lua object and
returns a hash code. This could then be used in conjunction with the
existing array support to implement space efficient sets on top of the stock
distribution.

Mark