Re: string[], doesn't exist?

[Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:37:01PM -0300, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> > why does [] not apply to strings?
> 
> It does, but it does not do what you want. But try this:

Thanks, that works as I hoped [] might, and is very educational.

It still leaves my wondering _why_, since indexing a string by a number
seems to effectively do nothing. Is the desire to do this considered to
be an end-user decision, when building their lua application?

>  s="lua"
>  print(s[2])
--> nil

What does it do? Playing around, it looks like I can do

> = s["len"]
function: 0x806be90
> = string.len
function: 0x806be90

So, it looks like

  getmetatable("").__index == string

for strings, but is nil for other builtins:

	> = getmetatable(5)
	nil
	> = getmetatable{}
	nil
	> = getmetatable(io.input())
	table: 0x806aae0
	> = io
	table: 0x806ad78
	>

Its not clear to me what the function of this is, why this is useful.

Thanks for your patience,
Sam