Lua Argument Packing – Part II

published on Thursday, March 2, 2017

This is a follow-up on my previous post covering argument packing in lua. My new-found lua foo has allowed me to write a new solution to address the problem of packing arguments in lua. It is slower (but who cares, right?), but also somewhat more elegant and insightful.

A quick reminder: If you write variadic functions and want to save (pack) the arguments for later use, you should do something more sophisticated than simply putting them in a table like this:

local function bind(f, ...)
    local x = {...} -- BAD!!
    return function()
        return f(unpack(x))
    end
end

If you do it like this, the number of unpacked values will be undefined in the presence of nil values in the argument list.

The previous post gave a solution using a pair of functions pack2() and unpack2() that store and use the number of arguments under a separate table key. A big flaw in this solution is that it doesn't make any use of metatables (and also that it needs a custom replacement for the builtin unpack function). As you know, everything is better with metatables.

Fortunately, now that we know the problem with the previous solution, we can write down a better one:

local function pack(...)
    local n = select('#', ...)
    return setmetatable({...}, {
        __len = function() return n end,
    })
end

which allows to write a correct version of the above function as:

local function bind(f, ...)
    local x = pack(...) -- GOOD!!
    return function()
        return f(unpack(x))
    end
end

Note that this time we can use the builtin unpack function and don't need to write our own replacement!

This entry was tagged functools, gist, lua and variadic