Re: Proposal: fallback of __tostring uses __name

[Charles Heywood <vandor2012@...>]

This would definitely be a great solution for adding custom userdata "types". Should `type()` also return __name or should there be another method to do this that doesn't involve __tostring ?

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 3:06 PM Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@gmx.net> wrote:

Am 10.11.2016 um 16:44 schröbte Daurnimator:
>
> In a large number of C bindings, people end up writing a __tostring
> that simply does what I mentioned. e.g.
>
>   - https://github.com/LuaDist/lrandom/blob/557814218d84db4d2991e86e1eb99fe9c5d65939/lrandom.c#L87
>   - https://github.com/daurnimator/lua-psl/blob/54a8a7875795d67d535f2dd8496a29dfe3885878/psl/psl.c#L62
>   - https://github.com/luvit/luv/blob/4977c67659cda9f2929b032c9ec7b7491deb63f3/src/req.c#L25

For the record: I do that as well for some of my libraries. But I
usually strip prefixes because I use `modulename.typename` for
`luaL_newmetatable()` to minimize conflicts and I want to keep the
output of `__tostring` significantly smaller than the length of a
terminal line.

>
> For those that don't, they often end up doing a poor imitation (e.g.
> using a delimiter other than ": ", or surrounding in some token).
> Which results in unnecessary non-uniformity.

Lua file handles currently use "file (0xdeadbeef)" (i.e. no colon but
extra parentheses). So that would be "fixed" as a bonus ...


Philipp

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