Re: lhs and rhs in table.sort

[iain morland <iain@...>]

Thank you for the further responses. I now see that rhs/lhs was a red herring!

Unfortunately I still don’t confidently grasp how the function works. Take the example in Roberto’s PiL book:

table.sort(network, function(a,b) return (a.name > b.name) end)

Presumably the function in the second argument returns true or false - right? Either a.name is greater than b.name or not.

But what are a and b? Does table.sort repeatedly call the function using successive pairs of items from the table ‘network’ as arguments a and b? 

And if the arguments passed to this function refer to a *different* table from that which is being sorted, where (in memory) is the sorting occurring? The other table doesn’t get sorted in-place, for its order remains the same.

I think the crux of my confusion is that the function in the second argument iterates, but it doesn’t look like an iterator - at least to the less trained reader.

Thanks
Iain