4 ms·

Love the language and how much has grown, but could never get past the 1-based indexing of table arrays.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
I like it, feels more natural and intuitive to me somehow. The presence of zero should be special; it doesn't quite feel like "just another number".
- vaylian 4y ago
  ... until you get into modulo arithmetic and then things come crashing down.
samatman 4y ago
Honestly, I've relaxed about that part quite a bit. Array tables are usually iterated with `ipairs`, appended with `insert`, popped with `remove` and so on. The difference between putting new stuff at `tab[#tab]` (the usual) and `tab[#tab + 1]` (the Lua style) just doesn't come up much. What is a genuine mistake, which I'll never get over, is the one-based semi-open interval string indices. Representing the spot before the first character as `1,0` is just awful, and it has real consequences for interval arithmetic, which is frequent with strings. The bugs are usually shallow, but I get really creative with cursing when I see something moved by two bytes, because I got the sign wrong on some fencepost arithmetic. pretty simple: is it (a - b + 1), (b - a + 1), (a - b - 1), or (b - a - 1)? There should only be two options. That said, it's pretty fantastic to use a language with a flaw, rather than a flawed language. I would definitely change how strings are treated, if I could, and yeah, probably zero-index tables as well, but that's about it. The lack of multiple return values in Python, requiring changes to every call site if you decide a tuple is better than a scalar, is dramatically worse than this, and I don't see people complaining much.
CapsAdmin 4y ago
Having used Lua and other zero indexed languages for a while, it's not that different from switching between a mac keyboard and windows keyboard. It can be annoying in the beginning, but your brain figures it out eventually.

I like it, feels more natural and intuitive to me somehow. The presence of zero should be special; it doesn't quite feel like "just another number".

vaylian 4y ago
... until you get into modulo arithmetic and then things come crashing down.

samatman 4y ago

Honestly, I've relaxed about that part quite a bit. Array tables are usually iterated with `ipairs`, appended with `insert`, popped with `remove` and so on. The difference between putting new stuff at `tab[#tab]` (the usual) and `tab[#tab + 1]` (the Lua style) just doesn't come up much. What is a genuine mistake, which I'll never get over, is the one-based semi-open interval string indices. Representing the spot before the first character as `1,0` is just awful, and it has real consequences for interval arithmetic, which is frequent with strings. The bugs are usually shallow, but I get really creative with cursing when I see something moved by two bytes, because I got the sign wrong on some fencepost arithmetic. pretty simple: is it (a - b + 1), (b - a + 1), (a - b - 1), or (b - a - 1)? There should only be two options. That said, it's pretty fantastic to use a language with a flaw, rather than a flawed language. I would definitely change how strings are treated, if I could, and yeah, probably zero-index tables as well, but that's about it. The lack of multiple return values in Python, requiring changes to every call site if you decide a tuple is better than a scalar, is dramatically worse than this, and I don't see people complaining much.

CapsAdmin 4y ago

Having used Lua and other zero indexed languages for a while, it's not that different from switching between a mac keyboard and windows keyboard. It can be annoying in the beginning, but your brain figures it out eventually.