Re: Upcoming changes in Lua 5.4

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Roberto Ierusalimschy once stated:
> 
> > Also noticed that var args will now be put into a table - wanted to
> > check if this is just an implementation detail - i.e. no user visible
> > impact on either Lua or the C API?
> 
> As already explained, you can use _ARG; but you can use also any other
> name:
> 
>   function foo (...=a) print(a.n) end
> 
> _ARG is present both for compatibility (the above syntax will not even
> compile in older versions) and for the main chunk (which does not have
> a header to name this parameter).

  Why not the following?

	function foo(...)
	  for i = 1 , #... do
	    print("the answer is",...[i])
	  end
	end

	foo(1,2,nil,3,4)
	the answer is	1
	the answer is	2
	the answer is	nil
	the answer is	3
	the answer is	4

  It gets rid of the clumsy select() function, it feels a bit more natural,
and you don't have to pack the arguments into a table.  I mean, this is
trivial in C:

	int foo(lua_State *L)
	{
	  int top = lua_gettop(L);
	  int i;

	  for (i = 1 ; i <= top ; i++)
	  {
	    printf("the answer is\t%s\n",luaL_tolstring(L,i,NULL));
	    lua_pop(L,1);
	  }
	  return 0;
	}

All this does is bring that ability into Lua.  And if you still want a
table, you can always do:

	a = { ... }

  -spc