Re: tables with multiple indeces?

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

Gavin Kistner wrote:
> On Mar 20, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Chris Marrin wrote:
>
> > This WILL happen if you do this:
> >
> >     t[{1,2,3}]
>
>
> As a silly idea, to simplify the syntax, how about:
> t{ 1, 2, 3 }
>
> Where 't' is actually a closure function wrapping up a table of your  
> choosing?

Or t can still be a table, whose metatable has a __call method. This 
will call the method with a single table param. The question is what do 
you want to do with this. If you say:

    local a = t{1,2,3}

Then presumably you are dereferencing the table in some interesting way, 
and the __call function can do that for reasonable results. But this:

    t{1,2,3} = 12

is not legal Lua syntax. Unfortunately, a Lua function cannot return an 
'lvalue' (in C nomemclature). Seems like it would be useful to allow a 
function call to be on the left side of an assignment statement. By 
default this:

    f(a,b) = 12+14

could translate to:

    f( {a,b}, {12+14} )

Using tables would make it easy to separate the input params from the 
right-side expression.

Just a thought...

--
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"As a general rule,don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell"'