how to load a very large table with more than 2^18 literal strings?

[nr@... (Norman Ramsey)]

I'm accustomed to use Lua to store persistent data structures on disk.
Unfortunately, in my latest venture, I run out of string space.  I did
a little investigation in the source, and it appears that only 2^18
literal constants may appear in any one source file, and this appears
to be a hard limit built into the bytecode format.

I would like to write large Lua tables out to disk, possibly nested, but 
with no sharing or cycles.  Does anybody have any suggestions how to 
achieve this without running afoul of the dreaded 'constant table overflow'?


Norman