Re: length operator [was: table insertion]

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

But Lua arrays start indexing at 1.

Mark

on 11/5/04 4:19 AM, leiradella@bigfoot.com at leiradella@bigfoot.com wrote:

> My opinion is that all proposed operators to get the length of a table are too
> cryptic to be used with a language with an intuitive syntax as Lua. A more
> intuitive length operator, at least for me, is |t|. Of course |s| could also
> be used to get the length of a string.
> 
> With this operator, appending a value to a table could be written as
> t[|t|]=value. And t[]=value could be used as a syntatic sugar for appending
> values, but I also like the t=t..value idea.
> 
> Just to make it clear, by length of a table I mean the index of the last
> non-nil element plus 1, or 0 on an empty table. This value can be stored as
> part of the table structure and updated as needed on the C side:
> 
> t={}
> print(|t|) -- 0
> t[|t|]='a' -- 'a' stored at index 0
> print(|t|) -- 1
> t[5]='b'
> print(|t|) -- 6