Odd semantic with nil in tables

[Aki Tuomi <cmouse@...>]

Hi!

I am looking at an odd behaviour of Lua tables with nil index.

Lua documents for tables says

   An associative array is an array that can be indexed not only with numbers, but also with strings or any other value of the language, except nil.

Yet, if we do

> foo = {}
> foo[nil]
nil

it works. Why? This sounds like this should emit error?

The reason this matters is that it is too easy to do errors with nil indexes, like when using named indexes from modules:

values[module.IDX_FOR_VALUE] = nil if there is no IDX_FOR_VALUE in module.

$ lua -v
Lua 5.3.3  Copyright (C) 1994-2016 Lua.org, PUC-Rio

Kind regards,
Aki Tuomi