Re: Bug report in length of simple table

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2016-09-14 16:04 GMT+02:00 Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br>:
>> 3. As Josh Billings put it, "The trouble with people is not what
>> they don't know, but what they know and it ain't so." If your
>> sequence ain't a sequence, #t will give you a frontier, i.e.
>> a filled position where the next one is empty. So you can
>> just keep on doing "t[#t+1]=newvalue" and never overwrite
>> anything already in the array. This behaviour used to be
>> documented, was removed because it might confuse some
>> people, but now that it has become clear that people get
>> confused anyway, we hope that the next Lua release might
>> restore it, since the implementation has not changed.
>
> We are planning to restore it. The new explanation would go like this.
> (What sounds better, "border" or "frontier"?)
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> A *border* in a table 't' is any non-negative integer such that
>
>    (border == 0 or t[border] ~= nil) and t[border + 1] == nil
>
> That is, a border points to any position in a table where a non-nil value
> is followed by a nil value (or to 0, when position 1 is empty).
>
> For instance, the table {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} has only one border, 5.  The
> table {1, 2, 3, nil, 5} has two borders, 3 and 5.  The table {nil, 2, 3,
> nil, 5, nil} has three borders, 0, 3 and 5. The table {} has one border,
> 0.
>
> Note that any table has at least one border.
> Note also that keys that are not a non-negative integer
> do not interfere with the notion of borders.
> The table {x=1, y=10} has one border, 1. The table
> {[1.1] = 1, [-3] = 1, [0] = 1, 1, 2, 3} also has one border, 3.
>
>
> A table with exactly one border is called a *sequence*.
>
> The length operator #t returns a border for the table 't'.
> When t is a sequence, #t returns its only border, which corresponds to
> the intuitive notion of the length of the sequence.
> When t is not a sequence, #t can return any of its borders. (The exact
> one depends on details of the internal representation of the table.)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Magnificent!

The word "frontier" is already in use for the %f pattern in strings, which
is strongly related but not the same thing. (For example, %f gives the
first available frontier which # does not). The distinction is different
enough to justify a different word. So I agree with "border".