Lua question: Refer to a Table row by name?

[bartbes]

It might be removed in the future, or rather, it will be.
The new syntax is pretty simple, and works for strings too:

Code: Select all

t = {"a", "b", "c", "d"}
print(#t) --> 4
s = "abc"
print(#s) --> 3

[Robin]

Note that "setting something to nil" doesn't destroy it, it just lowers the reference count by 1, if the rc reaches 0 the object is destroyed.

[Jasoco]

It might be removed in the future, or rather, it will be.
The new syntax is pretty simple, and works for strings too:

Code: Select all

t = {"a", "b", "c", "d"}
print(#t) --> 4
s = "abc"
print(#s) --> 3

Doesn't seem to work in 0.5.0 (Yes, I'm still using it. I haven't had the time to screw around and get it working in 0.6.0 yet.). Is it a new feature of Lua that only 0.6.0 has installed?

Note that "setting something to nil" doesn't destroy it, it just lowers the reference count by 1, if the rc reaches 0 the object is destroyed.

But does it still remove the row from memory? Or at least from view of the program as if it doesn't exist anymore? Since I can't use table.remove anymore with the method I need to use, I need an equivalent. And setting it to nil seems to work.

[Robin]

It might be removed in the future, or rather, it will be.
The new syntax is pretty simple, and works for strings too:

Code: Select all

t = {"a", "b", "c", "d"}
print(#t) --> 4
s = "abc"
print(#s) --> 3

Doesn't seem to work in 0.5.0 (Yes, I'm still using it. I haven't had the time to screw around and get it working in 0.6.0 yet.). Is it a new feature of Lua that only 0.6.0 has installed?

That should work. I'm not sure what is going on, but 0.5.0 uses Lua 5.1.

But does it still remove the row from memory? Or at least from view of the program as if it doesn't exist anymore? Since I can't use table.remove anymore with the method I need to use, I need an equivalent. And setting it to nil seems to work.

Well, it does if there is only one reference. Example:

Code: Select all

sometable = {'hello'}
otherref = sometable
sometable = nil
print(otherref[1]) --prints hello

Because the table had another reference, it was not deleted when the name sometable was pointed to nil.

[bartbes]

Well, unless you had some weird black magic setup the version of lua hasn't changed.