Re: The meaning of 'sugar' [Forked from Re: Why do we have ipairs?]

On 06/13/2014 09:07 AM, Ross Bencina wrote:

On 13/06/2014 4:13 PM, Thomas Jericke wrote:

I'll leave it to others to determine whether using string literals in
an interface is ever good style.

Ross.

Show me a Lua API that doesn't use string literals.

local myLib = require "MyLib" -- Oops a string literal
myLib.myFunction()
-- which is syntactic sugar for:
myLib["myFunction"]() -- Oops, another one.

So without sting literals, you cannot use globals, require, access table
elements of type string.

You're intentionally twisting my words.

No that is not my intention. I honestly that Lua builds heavily on string literals.

It's one thing to be able to use a string literal, quite enough to require its use in an interface.

But Lua does require to use strings literals almost everyone. In my example I even forgot one string literal:
require "MyLib" -- is syntactic sugar for
_ENV["require"]("MyLib")

We're not talking about module or function names here, we're talking about constants that are usually integers.

Ross.

I don't know how you store integer "constants" in Lua but I store them in a global or a table element.

SomeContants = {
    constant1 = 42,
    constant2 = 1773
}

And then I use it:
Any.Function("hello", SomeConstants.constant1)

And the same could be used in a case statement:

switch SomeInteger
  case SomeConstants.constant1
    print "SomeInteger was 41"
  case SomeConstants.constant2
end

But of course there is a catch. The switch case table would have to be built up every time
because, SomeConstants is not really constant. So I agree, this is not suitable.

So I see your problem with the problem if you want to switch for a number, but I don't
see a problem with string literals in a Lua interface. Actually as long as I stay in the Lua
worlds I prefer string literals over numbers as long as the number is only used as an enumeration.

--
Thomas