Re: [ANN] Lua 5.2.0 (alpha) now available

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Enrico Colombini <erix@erix.it> wrote:
> A minimalist crazy idea: perhaps, just to avoid surprises and offer a
> predictable behavior to Lua beginners, #t could return nil if the list has
> holes (i.e. it's not a proper array).

But that would break a lot of existing code that assumes that #t is
always safe - I find myself using #t > 0 to tell if something is a
array.

As it has been discussed, probably ad nauseum, don't put holes in
arrays _intentionally_. But it's easy to do it unintentionally.  The
paranoid programmer will do things like table.insert(t,assert(val)) to
catch these things early, or use special 'null' sentinel values. One
idea might be a special table mode that provides some kind of
protection (wrap or throw an assertion)

steve d.