Having trouble getting a program running

[Jasoco]

I didn't even realize kikito posted his own. Ignore mine. It sucks.

Anyway, what does def do versus function? And is there any benefit to using an underscore _ in the for loop?

[bartbes]

def vs function, well def doesn't exist.
_ vs i/k, no difference, but it tells people reading your source that you're not using it. (some languages actually see _ as an ignore keyword)

[Jasoco]

Oh, then why does kikito's code have def instead? Is that not valid code?

[bartbes]

It is not.

[Robin]

To clarify: def is in Python or Ruby what is function in Lua. I take it kikito was mistaken with one of those.

[Jasoco]

Oh. Good. Darn, I thought it was some new way of doing things I didn't know about.

Why can't all languages be the same? lol

[bartbes]

Because then they'd all suck.

[Robin]

... and you'd end up with PHP.

[Luiji]

The point of having different programming languages is so that they are different and better then each other. Personally, I wish there were less. I've learned 20 programming languages (at least), and I still haven't found the perfect one. Thus, I'm creating my own VM, etc., but that's besides the point.

So, _ tells programmers that it is ignored. That's pretty simple. It would be nice if Lua took that as a "black hole" and deleted anything sent to it (like on Linux when you redirect console output to /dev/null).

[thelinx]

It would be nice if Lua took that as a "black hole" and deleted anything sent to it (like on Linux when you redirect console output to /dev/null).

Code: Select all

setmetatable(_G, {__newindex = function(table, key, value)
    if key:sub(1,1) ~= "_" then
        rawset(table, key, value)
    end
    return
end})