Symmetry between language and C API (Was: (not) handling new programming idioms with grace

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

2018-07-20 20:57 GMT+02:00 William Ahern <william@25thandclement.com>:

> I wish people (myself included) would keep in mind the symmetry that Lua
> tries to maintain between the language and the C API. Aside from making the
> C API incomparably superior to other language implementations, the
> constraint keeps Lua honest and careful. If a feature can be elegantly
> expressed and implemented for *both* the language and the C API, that's
> strong evidence it's a quality choice. If it can't be, it suggests to keep
> searching.

One place where the symmetry currently is broken is concatenation.

The C API function lua_concat respects metamethods, the table.concat
function does not.