Re: Possible Lua enhancements (mostly for private data)

[Mark Hamburg <mark@...>]

Now that I've read the paper on the GC changes to deal with weak  
tables, I think I can comment more specifically.

The ephemerons approach looks like a good way to handle attaching  
secondary properties to objects. On the other hand, if you wanted to  
do something like build a linked-list data structure and keep the  
links private, it would readily get you into the quadratic case during  
the atomic phase of the collection which is not a good thing.

So, I think there's still an argument for having a way to create keys  
where the security can't be violated via pairs which is essentially  
what at least parts of this proposal were about.

Mark