Re: lua-5.1-alpha: length operator on tables (arrays) and nil

["Rici Lake" <lua@...>]

Lisa Parratt said:

> <devils advocate>except for ..., which appears to be a non-tabular
> compound data structure</devils advocate>

Indeed, but it is not in fact a first-class value. On the other hand, the
fact that it appears to be useful might indicate that tuples are a
worthwhile idea.

In fact, Lua has several compound datatypes other than tables, including
threads and functions, and as has been demonstrated, tuples can be
modelled with functions, so a new datatype is not necessary to provide the
facility.