Re: inadequate documentation for select and table.unpack

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 19 June 2016 at 08:53, Soni L. <fakedme@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 19/06/16 07:17 AM, Nagaev Boris wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 4:05 AM, Martin <eden_martin_fuhrspam@gmx.de>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 16-06-17 09:49 AM, Viacheslav Usov wrote:
>>>>
>>>> These functions are officially part of Lua's standard libraries.
>>>> However, except in their own subsections, they are not mentioned in the
>>>> reference manual, and their own subsections have no useful keyword like
>>>> "vararg" and "multiple results". The free version of the Lua book is
>>>> obsolete in this respect.
>>>
>>> They documented in language reference. Language reference is not
>>> intended to be introductory course for early start. So it may not order
>>> material in structured way with crosslinks.
>>>
>> Nevertheless the language reference of Lua is user-friendly and is
>> readable by Lua programmers not only people who implement Lua itself
>> (a rare case among programming languages: compare with C++ standard).
>> The language reference would not suffer from adding "vararg" and
>> "multiple results" to the text, but it would be more human-readable.
>>
> It would become redundant however. Note that select() talks about "index,
> ..." implying it takes a variable list of arguments, and note that
> table.unpack talks about "return list[i], list[i+1], ..., list[j]".

Redundant!? The manual is evidently not written to be the tersest
possible specification of the language: it does include examples and
clarifications here and there.

It is up to Roberto and LHF to decide whether it's worth adding
further clarification or rewording on this topic in the manual, but
still the observation is valid feedback.

-- Hisham