Re: [ANN] Updated uFAQ (Unofficial Lua FAQ)

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

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Axel Kittenberger <axkibe@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1.5.1 Why do Lua arrays count from one not zero?
> The answer does not answer the question. Why?

That's a good point. In my experience engineers and scientists (who
have been infected with the Excel virus and hack with VBA) don't get
arrays starting at zero. And they can't read curly-brace languages
either.

> 1.26 Why is there no continue statement?
>
> I think that answer could use some coding examples with 5.2 goto.

I took out the old answer (because it breaks repeat..until) but
Roberto has explained that this is just a side-effect of a wider
question; which is: what other control structures are possible?

> 1.12 I have seen Lua code with functions like strfind; why doesn't it work?
> Must have been from another decade.

Fair point - but then I must put something else in 1.12 ;)

> Remove the link to shootout.alioth, as we know, that guy removed
> LuaJIT, because #!*#!*#!*#!*#!*

Yep, silly nonsense! I'll point to Mike P's performance page.

> Things I see on the list several times pop up I dont see covered
> * Api checking: LUA_USE_APICECK
> * Ensureing stack size
> * metatables, no index and newindex on existing indexes. (and proxies
> as semi-elegant workaround)
> * #line style information for generators
> * Domain Specific Languages
> * luaposix
> * millesecond sleep

All good ones. Dauminator has suggested socket.sleep(), which takes a
floating-point second ,for the last item. luaposix definitely needs a
mention.   #line would be somewhat speculative and might constitute
'original research' ;)

I mentioned index/newindex in the 'gotchas' page (which needs a link
BTW) but it's sufficiently a sore point (as Mark pointed out) to
deserve some write-up.

steve d.