Re: Noob's attempt at Lua

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great siiky once stated:
> Hi there, list o/

  Hello.

> But there's the problem (for me at least): can a table be callable? 
> Would that be possible to do?

  Yes, it's easy to do with the __call metamethod.  An example:

	mt = { __call = function(self,x) return x end }
	t  = {}
	setmetatable(t,mt)

	print(t(3))

>  2. The server's replies are almost all in JSON. Is it worth it to make 
> the parser parameterized such that a user of the library may use any one 
> they like? For whatever reason -- it could be performance, less deps, 
> &c. It should be really easy to implement, it's just one extra instance 
> parameter.

  This might be quite involved, as I counted 45 JSON modules in LuaRocks
alone. Just looking at three of them:

dkjson defines the following:

	json.decode(string,position,nullvalue,mt)

		string - data to decode
		position - starting position, 1 if not given
		nullvalue - value to use for JSON null , nil if not given
		mt - returned data has metatable if not nil

org.conman.parsers.json (and org.conman.parsers.jsons) defines:

	json:match(string,position)

		string - data to decode
		position - starting position, 1 if not given

and to set a custom null value, a global variable 'null' can be defined.

json-lua defines:

		JSON:decode(string)

with no way to specify a value for JSON's null.

>  3. If you'd like to spend some of your precious time to educate a 
> noob, could you take a quick look at the code and see if there are any 
> glaring points to improve? :)

  Only one thing came to mind:  string.format("%q",s) will return some
characters escaped (see the manual for more information).

  -spc