Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (alpha) now available

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
> <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>>> It was mentioned that "table.clear" (or similar) was likely. Was it decided
>>> that it would not be useful?
>>
>> I don't think we even agreed on what it would do.
>
> As far as I see it, tables and closures are the only real mutable base
> types in Lua -- we generally don't need to nil'ify all the upvalues of
> a closure/function, but it would be nice to quickly dispense the array
> and hash portion of a table so the same object can be returned, and
> filled thereafter -- with the same associated metatable.  Just
> something faster than looping through the table in Lua to unreference
> everything?  I'm not sure what extra arguments it might take to
> selectively clear portions of the table.  Maybe the array or hash
> portion, or a starting and ending numeric index?  I might be very
> crazy... :p  Stop me if I have weird ideas.
>

Oh STAHP! ;)

Seriously, though, I can't see any real uses for it beyond just a
complete and total table wipe. Anything else is either adequately
served by nil assignment, or is an implementation detail that isn't
exposed anyway.

/s/ Adam