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Chris <coderight@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's much more complicated than that.  Often it's hard to tell what is
> FFI and what is regular Lua.  There is not always a clear separation
> because usually a combination of FFI and Lua types are used all at
> once.  I run in to this a lot when managing multiple FFI types in a
> regular Lua table and I often introduce bugs because of it (and I
> supposedly know what I am doing; no hope for a regular user).
>
> Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a clean solution because even
> changing LuaJIT to use one-based indexing will have problems with
> pointer arithmetic and such.

There are four points where Lua has one-based table indexes:

(1) In the implementation, which is invisible apart from the performance
effects. LuaJIT uses a zero base for the array part of its tables.

(2) In the syntax for array-like initialization of tables. You can use the
following pattern to construct zero-based arrays:

  t = { [0] = a, b, c }

(3) The length operator.

(4) In the library. Which is actually lots of points :-)

So if you are willing to wrap or reimplement the bits of the library that
you need, it should be fairly easy to adapt your coding style for
zero-based indexing.

Tony.
-- 
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