Re: new "empty" value/type in Lua?

[harry gotterwald <brachyonic@...>]

jesus christ. this discussion is nauseating. and I thought /I/ was a lua zealot, but this is just rabid and irrational. nobody here seems to be getting the point at all. I am actually unsubscribing from this list over this.

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Parke <parke.nexus@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com> wrote:

The only APIs were two small C functions exposed to Lua:

x = getEMPTY()

b = isEMPTY(x)

Hi Tim,

In terms of utility in your projects, how does the above solution compare to (hypothetically) extending Lua to force the "array" portion of a table at be least X large, on an adjustable, per table (or per metatable) basis?

In this hypothetical case, nil would mean empty, but you would not have to worry about the array portion collapsing due to sparsity.

In other words, other than avoiding unwanted table collapsing, are there other benefits to empty?

(I have no idea how much work it would be to make this hypothetical extension to Lua, nor how palatable other Lua users would find it.)

-Parke