Namespace pollution
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- Subject: Namespace pollution
- From: Dirk Laurie <dpl@...>
- Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 13:52:26 +0200
The author of the os and io extensions in
http://lua-users.org/wiki/ExtensionProposal
is criticized for polluting the standard namespaces. Now I can see the
point in those cases, since the functions are never called object-ly,
but always os.foo or io.foo.
However: what about the case of string functions?
For example, having been a Pascal programmer when there was not much
else to program in, I would love to write s[i] for s:sub(i,i).
The closest I can get is to use LHF's tip and assign something to
string metamethod __call so that s(i) means that. Fooling around
with __index scares me.
Or an iterator over string elements similar to table.pairs/ipairs:
for i in s:chars() do -- etc
If I have to write
for i in myext.chars(s) do -- etc
the temptation is rather to pollute the global namespace:
for i in chars(s) do -- etc
(Actually I rather like this: why must strings be less important
than tables?)
Dirk