Re: table.clear

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2013/12/13 Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com>:

> I believe what you've missed is a recent thread requesting a
> table.wipe function to the C API that could wipe a table more
> efficiently than iterating over the contents and nil'ing out every
> entry. This appears to be a request for functionality in this proposed
> function.

It was not obvious to me during that discussion, and it is even
less obvious now, that it is so very inefficient to do exactly that.
In fact, I can't see how any C routine would be able to avoid
doing it. Andrew's neat exploitation of the generic `for`:

    for i in next, t do t[i]  = nil end

is clear enough for me.