Re: Has Lua reached perfection?

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Sean Conner once stated:
> It was thus said that the Great nobody once stated:
> > Beside incoming improvements, present Lua also contains lots of tiny
> > warts... NaN being unusable as a table key is one of the bigger kinks –
> > a "discontinuity" in the type/value space that's hard to check for and
> > generates complexity whenever you have to deal with it. 
> 
>   Just in case you are unaware (or others are unaware), NaN is a special
> value defined by IEEE-754 (or rather, values) that have a unique property:
> 
> 	x = 0/0
> 	print(x,x==x)
> 	nan	false
> 
> A NaN is not equal to anything, including itself!  In fact, according to the
> standard, this:
> 
> 	x = 0/0
> 	y = 0/0
> 
> is not even guarenteed to produce the same bit pattern!  x and y just have
> to be designated as NaN.  So it would be difficult to make NaN to be a table
> value.  

  I meant to say "it would be difficult to make NaN to be a table key."

  -spc (Sigh)