Shorthand for appending to a table (was Re: 5.2 feature list?)

[Eric Scouten <scouten@...>]

Can I make a suggestion for 5.2 that I don't think I've seen here  
before? (If it has, I apologize; regrettably, I haven't kept up with  
every message on the list these days.)

When adding a new member to a table, I find myself writing code of  
the form

  p[ #p + 1 ] = value

a lot. In that case, it's not too awful, but if the table has a  
meaningful name, it become sort of cumbersome:

  tableWithMeaningfulName[ #tableWithMeaningfulName + 1 ] = value

Whatever you may think of PHP, there is one language feature there  
that I would be happy to see brought over to Lua: a shorthand for  
doing this operation

  tableWithMeaningfulName[] = value

In other words, omission of the table index inside the square  
brackets should be expanded to mean the next available integer index.

-Eric