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Am 14.03.2018 um 18:17 schröbte Pierre Chapuis:
On Wed, Mar 14, 2018, at 15:55, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:Every year or so the list has its recurrent discussion about the length operator and holes in sequences. Quite often, this discussion leads some people to propose that Lua needs an array type, different from tables.In practice, this is not the reason why people (at least me, but not only) wish Lua had an array type. The main reason is that Lua is a dynamic language where you can inspect the type of values (with type() mostly), but there is no standard way to know if a table is supposed to be a sequence or not when you get it. But in the outside world, things are not tables, they tend to be sequences or map. This causes issues when we try to interact with it using Lua.
Lua can interact with the outside world just fine. You just can't map Lua tables to outside arrays/maps automatically. That's to be expected, because Lua tables are more powerful that arrays/maps combined, and that's a win for Lua. Any serialization library that pretends this automatic mapping is (always) possible is flawed in its interface. Fortunately, library interfaces can be fixed. I'd suggest passing some form of schema/format into the serialization function (I don't like mutating/annotating my data structures with information that you basically only use for one function call). There's no need to water down Lua's data structures for the sake of communicating to the outside world.
Philipp