Re: ANSI Terminal Colors Module

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

>>> Also, I'd like to have color constants visible from outside the
>>> module, in case I'd ever want to implement my own makecolor.

>> What kind of makecolor adaptation did you have in mind?

> Well, nothing in particular right now. But I think that those
> constants do have value for themselves.

I'd like to add to my answer. :-)

The makecolor() as it is now is fine and clever, but I see several
small performance problems there. This is unnoticeable in most
use-cases, but sometimes people need every drop of performance.

For example, in functional form, it concatenates string:

    function colormt:__call(s)
        return self .. s .. _M.reset
    end

This would create extra garbage. Also I see here an extra __concat()
metamethod call.

Also, __concat unnecessarily calls __tostring on self (it could just
use self.value).  Also, self.value could be self[1]. :-)

For the use-cases when performance is critical (like log parsing and
highlighting), I'd like to have less convenient, but faster interface.
It is not necessary at all that such interface should be a part of
your module. But, by exporting constants (and that "magic"
concatentation from makecolor()) you'd increase reuse. It is probably
better to split ansicolor to two modules then, one high-level, one
low-level.

Alexander.