[mmjaa]

>"incoherent mixing of arrays and dictionaries"

Incoherent? 10 years of Lua development, never had a problem with it. In fact, the ability to use a table as either an array or a dictionary is one of the great features of the language. Most newbie Lua coders get over the differences pretty fast. For everyone else, there is lua-enumerable.lua ...

https://github.com/mikelovesrobots/lua-enumerable

[Pxtl]

Well, 10 years isn't the problem, it's picking it up in the first place. For example, the whole pairs/ipairs thing falls out of that original weird decision.

I love Lua. It's embeddable, it's written with newbie-friendliness in mind... but I still think it has flaws that I wish we'd see fixed. To me, the biggest one missing is just some simple convenience stuff for higher-order-functions - like I said before, the lack of a ternary "inline if" which is super-handy for writing one-line lambdas, and the verbosity of its lambda syntax.

[mmjaa]

I dunno, I think that the distinction between pairs/ipairs is quite handy - there are times when you want to use an array, a list, a dictionary, a sparse array, a sorted array, and so on. Lua's tables are so flexible that it can be used in all of these cases quite handily - of course, the programmer has to pay attention to how he's using those tables, though. I think thats kind of a strength, but ymmmv ..