select("#", ...) idiom

[Lucas Ackerman <glitch@...>]

I dislike the suddenly-popular select( "#", ... ) idiom because it is 
uninformative (no selection is made), complicates select with unrelated 
behavior, and misappropriates the # symbol.  Of everything 5.1-related on 
the Lua list, this is the ONLY item I've had to look up in the docs to 
grok!  Could this behavior be externalized?  I can only imagine that any 
reasonable coder would define

function count(...)	return select("#", ...)	end

or such with a useful name (slots, args, last, etc), if this remains in 
the standard library.

Lua has many beautiful idioms, please don't spread this ugly one!

-Lucas