Feature request: allow nil as table key

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

Hi,

Following some recent comments about the next version of Lua, I
remembered a proposal I did on IRC (as doub) but forgot to post here.

It would be nice to allow nil as a key in Lua tables. I don't see any
syntactic or semantical reason to prevent it, and I'm sure any
technical reason in the Lua sources can be overcome. It would have the
same semantics as all other immutable values. The initial/default
value of the nil key would be nil. It would then be read with "t[nil]"
and changed with "t[nil] = value". It would be usable in a table
constructor as "t = {[nil] = value}". Indexing with nil would trigger
the __index and __newindex metamethods.

The current behaviour could be emulated with a __newindex metamethod
that raise an error when passed a nil second parameter.

I think that modification would improve the overall consistency of
Lua. It would save us from handling the current special case when the
current behaviour is not needed.

Please comment (and I'd love to have the authors opinion on the
subject). I've never modified the Lua sources this extensively, but I
could give it a try if a patch would help the feature being
incorporated in the next version.