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That way really my only point .. that such a "blessing" will help interoperability. It was never HOW to implement such a feature privately … that's easy. It was just "I *think* this might be useful to have as an agreed-upon way to do something".

Think about booleans in C; they don't exist as a 1st class type, but they DO have an agreed-upon standard representation (that compilers understand). If we didn't have that, every project would define it's own arbitrary true and false, and each project, by itself, would work fine. But then each 3rd party library you use would have a different standard, and you would have to have conversion logic to transition between their arbitrary boolean and yours; for each and every library. Urgh!

My feeling, based upon some pretty heavy use of Lua, was that marking array elements as "unused", or "empty" or "placeholder" (whatever you want to call it) fell (perhaps only just) into that category too, though from the discussion here the consensus seems to be that this is not the case.

--Tim

On Jul 1, 2013, at 1:40 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:

What, apart from the fact that you need to require it, makes it fall
short of what is desired? Only the fact that the official Lua does
not have it and does not document it?