Re: Privately patching strings lib in Lua 5.2

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Saturday, December 21, 2013, steve donovan  wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 3:54 AM, Hisham <h@hisham.hm> wrote:
>
> > ...but that introduces a global change to your environment, anyway.
>
> It's a valid tactic if you're fully in control of your application,
> although redefining _existing_ functions is the kind of
> monkey-patching that gave Ruby a bad name (because it changes the
> semantics of any loaded libraries).
>
> In Penlight, I let people choose whether they want to bring the
> extended string functions pl.stringx into string itself, so people can
> use them with a colon. Personally I only do this when writing scripts,
> not programs.
>
> (An idea that has been floating around: tying string/function/etc
> metatable resolution to the environment, so one can write modules as
> one pleases without messing with everyone else's modules.  But this
> does not necessarily lead to nice clear self-evident code ;))

I think that this would be a decent enough idea for the strings table, but it's not a big issue. As it is, it leads me to choose between a completely pure environment existing outside of my heavily patched sandbox and one with a modified string table.

The only negative concequence being that I need something like "stringx" to keep it pure, which isn't so bad. 

Of course, there might be other use cases for ENV scoped metatables on base types... I haven't pondered that...

-Andrew