Re: return value of require?

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> "Jerome Vuarand" <jerome.vuarand@ubisoft.com> writes:
> >> Is swig being bad by returning a string instead?
> >
> > It's not following the informal convention used by most Lua modules. Is
> > it bad to be different ?
> 
> My _impression_ is that this is at least a "convention", and AFIACT,
> swig has no good reason to be different (the value it returns seems
> fairly useless), so I'd say... yeah.
> 
> But a quick look at PiL and the ref manual don't show any comment the
> issue, so I'm not really sure where I picked up this habit.  I guess
> really I'm looking for advice on what the Lua community considers in
> good taste.

PiL2 says this:

  From the user point of view, a module is a library that can be loaded
  through require and that defines one single global name containing
  a table. Everything that the module exports, such as functions and
  constants, it defines inside this table, which works as a namespace.
  A well-behaved module also arranges for require to return this table.

Also, the 'module' function follows this behavior.

-- Roberto