Re: What Lua can do that other programming languages can't do?

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

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> I really like the table-centricity.

Oh yes, one data structure does all! It's so convenient to have an
'array' which also has a 'map' part of key/value pairs.

Newcomers do however bump into table uses which will confuse them.
Yes, you can use a Lua table as a 'sparse array' but then don't trust
the built-in #!  In Lua 5.2, give it a metatable and a __len
metamethmod and define # to be exactly what you mean. (May be more
efficient to use an index array in this case; the user need not know
this.)

Plus, remember the limitations of the table.* functions; they mostly
assume _arrays_, which are defined as sequences of elements
{[1]='a',[2]='b',...} with no holes, like table.sort and table.concat.
 table.insert should be used with caution since it can introduce holes
if the index isn't 1 to #t+1.

steve d.