Re: The meaning of 'sugar' [Forked from Re: Why do we have ipairs?]

[Thomas Jericke <tjericke@...>]

On 06/13/2014 04:58 AM, Ross Bencina wrote:
> On 13/06/2014 12:15 PM, Coda Highland wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:12 PM, Rena<hyperhacker@gmail.com>  wrote:
> > > >On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 10:13 PM, Ross 
> > > Bencina<rossb-lists@audiomulch.com>
> > > >wrote:
> > > > >>
> > > > >>The problem is in Lua (unless I'm missing something), you don't have
> > > > >>symbolic constants
>
> [snip]
>
> > > >Well, Lua *does* have constants:
>
> String literals are *not* symbolic constants.
>
>
> > > >switch event.type
> > > >   case 'move' print("I was moved to", event.x, event.y) break
> > > >   case 'resize' print("I was resized to", event.w, event.h) break
> > > >   case else print("I don't know how to deal with", event.type)
> > > >end
> > > >
> > And thanks to string interning, these are as fast as integer 
> > comparisons.
>
> That doesn't help you when you already have an integer.
>
> I'll leave it to others to determine whether using string literals in 
> an interface is ever good style.
>
> Ross.
Show me a Lua API that doesn't use string literals.

local myLib = require "MyLib" -- Oops a string literal
myLib.myFunction()
-- which is syntactic sugar for:
myLib["myFunction"]() -- Oops, another one.

So without sting literals, you cannot use globals, require, access table 
elements of type string.

--
Thomas