Re: upcoming changes in Lua 5.2 [was Re: Location of a package]

[Diego Nehab <diego@...>]

Hi,

> Yes, luaL_tostring will invoke the __tostring metamethod (like
> 'tostring' does currently). (But I fail to see how this would allow for
> strings not managed by Lua, unless there are other changes. After
> all, the final result of the __tostring metamethod should be a string.)

I see what you mean. In the end, for Lua to use the string,
a string would have to be created. Nonetheless, this would
allow for somewhat "lazy" strings. A library would return
userdata that can be automatically converted to strings by
functions such as print(), *if* the user passes such
userdata to print(). The library itself, on the other hand,
would be able to completely skip such conversion.

This brings up the question of non-interned strings. I
thought about this some time ago but gave up.  We'd need a C
metamethod that can obtain a pointer and a length from a
userdata (or a non-interned string object).  Since userdata
can change through time, the semantics becomes too
complicated, especially when indexing tables. So I gave up
on it.

Regards,
Diego