Re: lstrlib.c initialization - why createmetatable?

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

Duncan Cross wrote:

> The purpose of that function is to set a metatable for the base
> "string" type, so that method calls on a string instance will call
> functions in the string library. For example:
>
>   a = "Blah blah blah"
>   b = a:upper()
>
> ...becomes equivalent to:
>
>   a = "Blah blah blah"
>   b = string.upper(a)
>
> Unlike tables (and full userdata), which can each individually have
> their own metatable, the base types (string, number, boolean, etc.)
> each have a shared metatable that is used by all values of that type.

Beautiful! Now the next step is to figure out how to delete that
metatable programmatically so that when I do

string = nil

to get rid of the string library, it is also deleted from _LOADED
and garbage collected.

Ralph