Performance vs flexibility

[Marco Bambini <marco@...>]

Hello,
one of the criticisms about Lua is the way it uses globals (using an hash table instead of a regular array and so performance suffers when globals are accessed).

I just wondering what's behind that design decision, I mean what's the pro and cons of having an hash table for globals instead of a simpler array?
Thanks a lot.
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Marco Bambini
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