RE: metamethods for assignment and type conversion

["Aaron Brown" <arundelo@...>]

Adrien de Croy wrote:

> this would also then allow lua script like
>
> function dosomething(object1, object2)
>    object2.somemember = "hello";
>    object1 = object2; -- deep copy in host via __assign
>                       -- metamethod rather than table reference
> end

I think this is a bad idea, because it's a radical change to
Lua's semantics, in which an assignment whose left-hand side
is a variable name always mutates the variable, never the
value contained in it.  An __assign metamethod would change
that and also block regular assignment.

Better to do something like:

 deepcopy(src, dest) -- Mutates dest into a deep copy of src.

--
Aaron
http://arundelo.com/

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