Re: table.maxn...

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

On May 31, 2015, at 1:05 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:

I accounted for that in the very message you replied to -- IF you
don't know for sure that you're processing a sequence, THEN you should
be doing something different.

But what is the “something different”?

— If you want to be rigorous then, yes, you DO check for a valid sequence (your arguments notwithstanding). This isn’t easy in Lua (see my other post).

— if the “something different” is “malfunction, not my problem” then that depends entirely on the nature of the malfunction. In our work the result of a malfunction can be “the patient dies”, and just pointing a finger of blame to another part of the system isn’t acceptable.

I’m fine with the Lua libraries not doing checking, but extending that to “no-one else should either” doesn’t seem a good argument to me.

—Tim