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On 22-Jan-07, at 11:25 AM, Mark Hamburg wrote:

on 1/19/07 7:05 PM, Rici Lake at lua@ricilake.net wrote:

Yes. Either lua_tostring() will change the key into something else,
which is a problem, or it will return NULL, which might cause your
writeString() function to segfault.

I have to say that the automatic coercion between strings and numbers in the
Lua API is one of my least favorite features. I had mostly seen it as
unnecessary cruft in the past. This thread points out that it is downright
dangerous.

Could we perhaps see a shift in which the core API did not do the
conversion, but luaL_tostring and luaL_tonumber would do so? Furthermore, it would be nice if luaL_tostring was essentially the same as invoking tostring
on the value so that it could handle arbitrary objects.

I agree, wholeheartedly.