Re: Quest: real world "Lua array with holes" usage

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> I agree with Jorge. Also, sometimes when returning multiple things,
> one of these things might be nil, so it's not only the error situation
> that produces a nil value upon return, although it is of course the
> most common. So, unfortunately just changing the policy from
> nil-on-error to false-on-error still wouldn't allow us to just forget
> about table.pack().

Of course any function can return nil among its returns, but maybe
that might be considered a bad practice.

My point is that, if nil is representing the absence of a value, it
is weird not to have a third value but to have a fourth one. If nil
is representing something else, probably it shouldn't be (as pointed
out by others already).

("is weird" ~ "it might be considered weird")

-- Roberto