John Passaniti wrote:
Also, in embedded systems (where a hex constant notation would probably be desirable) the string library could be unavailable due to space/time/gc constraints, so gsub could not be used.2. The function that transforms the string literal takes some non-zero amount of time to process. Typically this is going to be a call to gsub. That's generally pretty efficient, but still far more expensive than a LOADK instruction. Consider what happens if the transformation function is called inside a loop that executes many times.
Enrico