Re: In Lua 5.3 -- why were string.[un]pack(int|float)() added?

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

On Saturday, April 19, 2014, Michal Kottman <michal.kottman@gmail.com> wrote:

On 19 April 2014 12:08, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm just curious what the use-case was, I didn't initially notice them
> because I was pretty happy about the utf8 library.
>
> What do these functions make possible (beyond the obvious)?

They allow you to implement 'struct' or 'lpack' functionality directly in Lua - i.e. serialize/deserialize binary data. I am actually very happy these were added.

 

1++ on this. 

In an earlier thread I had asked what Lua-esq thing could done to help with the one-state-per-thread use case.

For what it's worth, I think this is a perfect answer. There might be more, but this alone makes me happy, even if there were other libraries that worked well, too.

-Andrew