Re: 'table' as fallback for tables

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:40 AM, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
> <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>>> Bingo! I'd say an `n` key with an integer value greater than or
>>> equal to 0, but let's not nitpick. I also think this would have been
>>> a viable alternative to the sequence concept we now have, because it
>>> has some useful properties:
>>>
>>> *  [...]
>>
>> Something that seems to be missing in this discussion is constructors:
>>
>>    l = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
>>    print(#l)          --> ?  (no 'l.n'...)
>>
>> -- Roberto
>>
>
> I think this has been mentioned before, but my personal opinion is
> that table.pack is effectively the "array constructor".
>
> l = table.pack(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
> print(#l)  --> 5, obviously
> print(l.n) --> also 5
>
> /s/ Adam

Upon further reflection this has a noteworthy disadvantage of being
considerably worse performance than a table literal, since it can't be
efficiently handled at compile time.

Fixing that would... probably require new syntax. So maybe I'm wrong
and this isn't a good way of going about it.

/s/ Adam