Re: proposal for reading individual characters from strings faster

[Thomas Jericke <tjericke@...>]

On 05/05/2014 10:13 PM, Coroutines wrote:
> If strings did not have a metatable then [] could
> be sugar (not __index) for looking up the byte at that index (a sort
> of fast-tracked C call).
I don't see a problem here. AFAIK the standard string metatable does not 
define any number fields.
That means that you could easily patch the VM to index the string when 
you call string[Number]
if the index is not a number, Lua would fall back to the metatable, as 
usual.

It would only be a problem for user defined metatables for string that 
define numerical index, with a different meaning.
--
Thomas