Re: ipairs in Lua 5.3.0-alpha

[Coroutines <coroutines@...>]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:02 AM, Daniel Silverstone
> <dsilvers@digital-scurf.org> wrote:
>
>> Such a level of flexibility would severely limit the analysis of code.  There's
>> a reason C++ doesn't allow overloading of operators on intrinsic types; and
>> similarly there's a reason Python's so very hard to write a fast interpreter
>> for.
>>
>> "interesting" it may be, but "sensible" "efficient" and "worthwhile" I'd argue
>> it would not be.
>
> I do not disagree -- I can't think of practical advantages to having
> base mechanics exposed this way.  (Also I know I'm very off-topic)
>
> I think I remember a while back wanting to make sure division could
> never return NaN -- I wanted to make 0 / 0 return "nothing".  It had
> me thinking about this because I wanted to wrap the __div C code
> without touching any C.  I just thought if Lua did this it would be a
> very flexible language -- but it'd also need some way to replace the
> "constructor" for literals.  Like, it'd be nice to have 0 appear in
> the source and call a third-party bignum constructor.  I definitely
> agree this level of flexibility would only make Lua slower.
> Personally I would not mind it as I know Lua to already be so fast --
> not suitable for everyone but maybe my own pet projects :-)
>
> PS: I also wanted the ability to set an initial metatable on the table
> type, which could be the `table' library :p  Yes we all have
> constructors but it's so nice when you can monkey patch third-party
> libraries that just "a = {}"
>
> PPS: I'm so very very off topic... T.T  ((sorry))

Er... following up on a trailing thought: I think I'd also want a
__construct metamethod for Lua's types and a way to define object
literal syntax.

{ 'cat', 'dog', 'mouse' } would chain to table.__construct('cat',
'dog', 'mouse') -- and I could replace __construct with code of my own
or let it use the stock constructor.  In this way Lua would become
very, very flexible -- it's exciting for me thinking you could replace
all of Lua's number type with methods to use the gnu's bignum library
and it'd still look like: 3.5829552895892 + 4

Anyway, yes -- I still agree that it would make it much less
efficient.  I just like the prospects so I'll play with these ideas in
my own stuff :3

I'd love to be able to define methods that would build a vector from /1, 2, 3/