Re: table.maxn...

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Monday, June 1, 2015, Brigham Toskin <brighamtoskin@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Brigham Toskin <brighamtoskin@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
> <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> Another reason not to do so is that it makes '#' mostly useless for
>> sequences (which are the only reason for its existence).
>
>
> Oh, I don't know that's necessarily true. In the case where t is a sequence
> (with no non-numeric keys), then #t == numentries(t), sure. But they are
> answering fundamentally different questions. It's kinda like saying that
> pairs() is a bad idea because it makes ipairs() redundant for sequences.

Historical note: ipairs() nearly got removed (in favor of "for k in 1,
#t") so this might not be the most useful argument. ;)

I think I've actually written that exact line of code a few times ;)

The real point I suppose is that "it makes something else not useful" is probably only more reason to do it, not an argument against.

--

Brigham Toskin

This is not true. I do not want # to count string keys; only integers from 1..n where the values are not nil. So, the current behavior is all that I want. I'm not against anything here, but I've never needed to know that total number of non-nils.

I have wanted to loop through a table and have the numeric keys in order and the string keys in any order they choose. 

I care about ordinality and not always sequences. There are many times that I wish that ipairs would go through all integer keys, in order. I've never needed all numbers (float too) to behave that way, but if it did, it would be fine. One could argue for that world and then checking for sequences would be uber trivial. But that would make writing numeric keys somewhat special and would break code.

As is, I do tricks like table of tables with [1] containing the index and it's fine. 

-Andrew