Re: Tables as vectors weirdness

[Duck <duck@...>]

> If I thinking about starting and ending indicies is
> actually relevant, the fault is in the programming
> language.

In some senses, Lua is much more flexible in this regard than many 
programming languages, because you genuinely don't have to think about the 
indices at all. (In C, for example, not only do you have to remember to 
start at 0 and to end most strictly at size-1, you also have to remember 
to use numeric indices only. In Lua, your indices can be any Lua value, 
with the notable exception of nil. So you can index tables with tables, 
functions, integers, strings.)

But with this freedom comes responsibility -- how to interpret the indices 
in your table is entirely up to you. There is no such thing as a "vector."

There is a single, special kind of table, viz: the array, which depends 
upon being indexed from 1 to n, with no gaps in between. Some library 
functions, plus the '#' operator, exist which in turn depend upon 
this internal layout. Don't like? Don't use.

Incidentally, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. Lua could be fitted with 
several special sorts of table, to suit everybody, at the expense of size 
and speed. It issn't -- the so-called "array" is the only special type of 
table and the slightly "non-deterministic" behaviour of # is like it is 
for reasons of efficiency. (You can find the largest integer index used in 
a table with the table.maxn() function, by the way. But it's not as quick 
as using #.)

> Given the weirdness of "vectors", what am I likely to find with
> "strings"?

Depends what you think a "string" is supposed to be. If you are a C 
programmer, you'll be amazed how reliable and easy they are. If you are a 
FORTRAN programmer, you probably won't need them :-)

Oh, strings are immutable (like Python), which might annoy you if you 
believe that this is a bad semantic choice. So every time you modify a 
string, for example by chopping a character off the end, you get a new 
string. Again, this is a feature, unless you expect Lua to be exactly like 
<some other language which has mutable strings>.

> I don't want to have to *care* about a vector index start *or* end.
> It should be completely opaque.
[snip]
> Either the semantics need to be cleaned up, or it really needs
> to be split out into a separate syntactic structure/system/etc.

Someone has to care, in order to deliver the programmatic facility you 
want which permits you not to care. (RAM doesn't organise itself.) In Lua, 
as someone (PA?) said the other day, with Lua you often have to bring your 
own batteries...again (look at the compiled size of the Lua binaries :-) 
this is both a strength and a weakness. In this sense, "vectors" are 
already split out into a separate system.