[masklinn]

> reading the title brought "Lua table"[2] to my mind, the most flexible data structure I have worked with, by far.

Which is not necessarily a good thing. PHP's array and JS's Object are essentially the same thing.

[pygy_]

Lua tables accept arbitrary objects as keys, and make a difference between `foo[1]` and `foo["1"]`.

Plus all the metatables goodies: weak key and/or value references, prototype inheritance, ...

[jschwartzi]

They even mark the difference to the degree that foo[1] is stored in a special "array part" of the table, while foo["1"] ends up in the hash part. Predictably, the array part uses less memory.

[thaumasiotes]

> Lua tables accept arbitrary objects as keys, and make a difference between `foo[1]` and `foo["1"]`.

That sounds... completely normal? Python dictionaries will do that too. So will Java HashMaps.

[sirclueless]

That comment was responding to a comment about PHP and JS, both of which do not make such a distinction.

[seabee]

There is another subtlety that values associated with integer keys are stored as an array. dicts and HashMaps don't do this.

[adrusi]

And not even all integer keys! Lua will efficiently handle sparse arrays using tables.