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

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > > 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.
 > 
 > The usual solution for this is to divide your data into functions because
 > the limit is per function. This has been discussed before:
 > 	http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-02/msg00298.html

Thanks Luiz for this pointer.  I wish I had your memory.

I have some generic code that writes any tree-like Lua table
containing only strings, numbers, Booleans, and other tables.
I will have to see if I can adapt it to this purpose without
disrupting things too much.  I would prefer to write large table
literals than to populate tables by individual assignment, since I
don't want to pay the costs for growth.

If I get any decent code, I will post it.


Norman

P.S. Am I thinking that the table literal

  { name = 'Ramsey', age = 47 }

contains *four* constants that count against the limit?