Re: Documenting Lua gotchas for newbies.

[Michal Kottman <k0mpjut0r@...>]

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 21:53 +0100, Lorenzo Donati wrote:
> Pierre-Yves Gérardy wrote:
> > Following the floating point discussion, I tried to look for a 
> > compilation of the various gotchas Lua beginners encounter, but I 
> > couldn't find one, so I decided to compile one...
> > 
> 
> Very commendable initiative! :-)
> 
> If these could be considered gotchas:
> 
> 1. I discovered "late in the game" that the most efficient way to append 
> an item to an array was
> a[#a+1]=item
> and not
> table.insert(a,item)
> 
> 
> 2. (this is more on the "someone tell me the rationale" side)
> I was really puzzled that no library copy operation existed (ie. 
> table.copy).
> After all the only data structure in Lua are tables, and making shallow 
> or deep copies of them is not something one should consider an 
> infrequent operation. Only after a while I began to understand the 
> minimalistic "philosophy" of Lua.
> 

Maybe http://snippets.luacode.org/ (work in progress) could serve as a
good starting point for beginners...