I apologize for the delay in response to your reply to my question. I was away in a class.
The question was about a function that returned a table. The debugging messages in the function indicated that the table was properly built, but the main routine had nil for a table. The function was more than a page long, and I made a typographical error in the return statement. So the problem was my “fat fingers” that type more than one key per keystroke. I could not view the return statement and the guts of the code at the same time.
Thanks for your response.
It would seem to me that an option like VB’s “Option Explicit” where all variable names must be declared would help with this sort of problem. Is this a major code effort, something that would compromise lua’s philosophy, or …?