Re: A question about table's length

[Vaughan McAlley <ockegheim@...>]

2010/1/2 Leo Razoumov <slonik.az@gmail.com>:

> It is not for the purpose of preserving the length of the result but
> rather to preserve the iteration order. Using "pair" on Lua table does
> not guarantee the order of iteration. "ipair" while guaranteeing the
> order of iteration will choke on the first "nil" value. Replacing
> "nil" with "false" allows to iterate with "ipair" over all the results
> from "map" and skip the "false" values using "if" conditionals.
>
> --Leo--
>

Hmmm... ipairs is easy to replace:

a = {}
a[1] = 1
a[2] = nil
a[3] = 3

for i = 1, table.maxn(a) do
   print(i, a[i])
end

Is the issue that this is not strictly an iterator?

Vaughan