Lua table implementation

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

I use a language named AutoHotkey (or AHK), which allows to automate 
Windows applications.
It still has lot of rough edges in its syntax, but it is useful to help 
day to day tasks.

Currently, it has only a very primitive array system, which is 
interesting by its concept, but is quite limited:
In AHK, if var contains foo, array_name_%var% becomes the array_name_foo 
variable. So we can have numerical arrays (v = 1, a%v% is a1, like a[1]) 
and even associative arrays (limited to the range of characters allowed 
in variables names...).
A big limitation is that these arrays are hard to make local, and nearly 
impossible to give as parameters to a function or to return them.

So the author of the language plans to implement true arrays.
I believe he should go one step further, and implement associative 
arrays as well. And naturally, I took a look at the way tables are 
implemented in Lua, knowing they are efficient and easy to use.

Of course, I have (re)read the Implementation of Lua 5.0 paper, and even 
the Reducing the retrieval time of scatter storage techniques one. The 
later is a bit too theoretical for my taste, but I suppose I could 
manage to get something out of it.

I also took a look at ltable.c, but without knowing intimately the 
internals of Lua, it is hard to follow (gnode, gkey?).
I believe that with lot of work, I can flatten this and make it usable 
for my needs, but I thought I should first ask if somebody did something 
like that before, so I won't reinvent the wheel (or recut it to make it 
oval...).

In other words, do somebody know some alternative implementation, or has 
done some detailed analysis of this algorithm or have some other 
material I could use?

In all cases, I will share my findings with the community, of course.

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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