Why can't I do for...in on a table?

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

I remember this thread passing by a couple of months ago, but I did not 
understand then, and I still don't understand now why I can't go like this:

    local t = { a = 1, b = "hello" }
    for p in t do
        print("t[",p,"] = ",t[p])
    end

This works in 5.0 and I use it extensively. Syntactically, it looks very 
nice to me, much nicer than table.foreach() or using pairs(). I know 
that pairs has the nice feature that it gives me back the already 
dereffed value. But I really dislike the inscrutability of this method. 
Also, it seems like it would be more efficient to use a table directly 
for a couple of reasons. First, the special code that must have been in 
place to handle a table directly would be faster than having to make a 
function call every time. And if I just wanted the property and not the 
value, pairs() will do a deref that I don't need. Admittedly in this 
case I was dereffing the property anyway. But in cases where I don't 
need to, seems like I don't have a way to do that anymore!

What problem was being caused by "for p in t do" ???

--
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