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Ah right,

Thanks guys I understand now.

Thanks

On 14 Feb 2009, at 14:45, Peter Cawley wrote:


Imagine for a minute what would happen *if* tables automatically had a
{__index = table} metatable:
* Checks like "if getmetatable(t) == nil then" to see if a table has a
metatable would fail
* Tables which contained members like "sort" and "concat" would cause
code which used the t:sort() syntax to fail
* All tables would have fields like "sort" and "concat" by default,
causing code like "t.sort = t.sort or 'ascending'" to fail

In short, it would cause more problems that it would solve.

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Kristofer Karlsson
<kristofer.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:
The difference is that strings share a metatable with __index set to the 
string table as default.
This is not true for generic tables, since individual tables can be set to 
different metatables.
If you want, you can do:
setmetatable(a, {__index = table}) and get the behaviour you wanted for 
table a
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Peter Hickman <peterhi@ntlworld.com> wrote: 

I can see what you are both saying but I came from code like this:
string.fred = function (s)
return s..s
end
a = "xxx"
print(a)
b = a:fred()
print(b)
Which does work. It has added a method to the string object and an
instance of a string has picked up the method. I thought that it would also 
work for tables also
On 14 Feb 2009, at 14:08, Duncan Cross wrote:
On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Peter Hickman <peterhi@ntlworld.com> 
wrote:
I have some code that I want to use to add an invert method to tables. 

table.invert = function (t)
      local i = {}
      for k in pairs(t) do
              i[t[k]] = true
      end
      return i
end
When I call it as "table.invert(a)" it works fine, but it errors when I 
call it as "a:invert()"

lua: invert.lua:15: attempt to call method 'invert' (a nil value)
My understanding was that a:invert() was just sugar on table.invert(a), 
what am I doing wrong?


a:invert() is actually sugar for a.invert(a), which will only be
equivalent to table.invert(a) if you have a metatable set on 'a' which looks 
up the 'table' library when __index is called.
The situation is different with strings because all string values share a common metatable, while tables each individually have their own metatable, which by default is nil. Therefore tables will never inherit any methods as 
soon as they are created, something has to be done to provide them.