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Good work on the 5.1 release, I look forward to using it.

Naturally there are some very minor mistakes in the reference manual.

The description of tonumber(e, base) can be read to imply that tonumber('c', 11) would be 12. You need to say that "Characters representing numbers that are not smaller than the specified base are invalid". Let's not forget that until ANSI said otherwise many C compilers treated 089 as a valid "octal" constant.

Section 2.2 says tables "can contain values of all types (except nil)", but this is inconsistent with ipairs which says "up to the first integer key with a nil value in the table" (keys can't have nil values), and "next" which says "There is no difference between a field not present in a table or a field with value nil". Overall I think it's slightly more consistent to say that tables can have fields with value nil but that the iterators ignore fields with a nil value. Then you might need to change the last paragraph of the description of "next" to say "The behavior of next is undefined if, during the traversal, you assign any value to a field that previously had a nil value".

2.5.5 The Length Operator should say "The length of a table t is defined to be any non-negative integer index n such that ..."

Section 2.5.9 has the sentence: "If a vararg expression is used inside another expression or in the middle of a list of expressions, then its return list is adjusted to one element." The phrase "its return list" is confusing. The return list of what? What's a return list anyway? I think it would be better to just say "it" or "the vararg expression" instead of "its return list".

David Jones