Re: Slight discrepency in the documentation for

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 7-Feb-07, at 6:49 PM, Eric Raible wrote:

> And obviously it could break things if one redefines "next" 
> inappropriately
> (that's what I meant by "both the advantage and the disadvantage" in my
> original post).

If you wanted that advantage, you should redefine pairs instead of (or 
as well as) redefining next. Looking up next() in the globals table is 
not the same as looking it up in the current function environment, and 
that can get really confusing really fast.

Personally, I think that pairs() ought to look up a __pairs() 
metamethod, using (the built-in) next() function as a default; I've 
found that to be extremely useful. There's a sample implementation at 
http://lua-users.org/wiki/GeneralizedPairsAndIpairs

I'm not as convinced by the ipairs implementation on that page as I was 
when I first wrote, but I've left it there for historical reference.