Re: A question of style for C module writers

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 07.04.19 um 09:00 schröbte Marc Balmer:
> Hi all

Hi!

> I have a question of style.  It's about using constants in modules.
>
> Let's say we have a fictious C library libfoo that defines a preprocessor symbol INFO with a value of e.g. 42.
>
> Then I write a Lua module foo which exposes libfoo's functionality to Lua.  Should INFO be an integer constant in foo or rather a string that is looked up using luaL_checkoption()?
>
> i.e.
>
> foo.somefunc(foo.INFO, 'test data')
>
> or
>
> foo.somefunc('info', 'test data')
>
> It's probably only a question of style or taste, but what is your opininion (or remarks) on this?

That depends on how INFO is used. If it is passed unmodified to 
functions, I use string options. If it can be combined with other 
constants using bitwise operations, I use full userdata with interning 
for extra type safety. If you are supposed to pass an integer and INFO 
is just one particular example of such an argument, I use integers. The 
last one hasn't happened for me yet, I think.

> - mb

Philipp