no more lua tag methods?

[Paul Swanson <pswanson@...>]

Most of the proposed changes (for Lua 4.1?) are good, or at least neutral
for me.  One of them, however, troubles me greatly:

- no more tag methods for basic types: only tables and userdata can have
a "handler-table". Moreover, "basic" tables and userdata (that is, those
that you did not set a handler-table) cannot have tag methods, either.

I have implemented many extensions to the Lua language, including the
following:

tableA + tableB => modified tableA with "defaults" provided by tableB
arrayA .. arrayB => modified arrayA with arrayB as elements nA .. nA+B
nil + tableA => duplicate of tableA

I suppose I can emulate this behaviour by using copytagmethods() for every
new tag/object I create, but that seems like a lot of effort to work
around an unnecessary restriction.

I have also been considering other extensions as well (which would not be
possible without tag methods for basic types, including tables).  For
instance:  "string1" ^ "string2" would always generate an error, with
absolutely no way to override it.

Am I misunderstanding the intent or implementation of the above "feature"?

Also, I would like to reiterate my request to change the functionality of
format("%q"), so that it replaces newlines with \\n, instead of \\\n.
Note that those are both two-character sequences beginning with a
backslash :)

paul