Re: A guide to building Lua modules

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 16.04.2014 08:17 schröbte steve donovan:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Tom N Harris <telliamed@whoopdedo.org> wrote:
> > Or get rid of the metatable and tell everyone to use the `string` functions
> > directly.
>
> Which would be a backwards step, IMHO.  String methods are very
> convenient (although a _little_ slower than localized functions).  In
> any case,  the string table is global and people can patch it anyway -
> the metatable just has __index=string.

On the other hand the polymorphism is totally superfluous so far, 
because AFAIK no-one has implemented an additional string type for Lua 
yet (the UTF-8 strings use normal Lua strings as backend, so the shared 
metatable prevents you from providing specialized methods for them).

> Paranoid people can always give strings a metatable which points to
> their own protected copy of string...

Hmm, interesting! I didn't think of that ... Now only the issue with 
sandboxing remains.

Philipp