Using environment for OO

["Martin C. Martin" <martin@...>]

Hi,

A standard approach to OO in Lua is to pass the "self" object as the 
first argument.  Lua has syntactic support for this with the : operator, 
and it follows what languages like Java & C++ do.  This means that you 
can refer to globals using "a" and fields of the object as "self.a".

Another option is to use the object (i.e. table) as the environment of 
the function.  Then you refer to fields using "a", and globals using 
"_G.a".  It would be easy enough to set up "global" as a synonym for "_G".

For an OO style while accessing fields is more common than globals, the 
environment option seems cleaner than the standard : option.  Are there 
any down sides that I'm missing?

Best,
Martin