Hi, do you think it's possible to implemented something like Lua Tables (a hashed heterogeneous associative array) in D?

I know that Lua is dynamic and interpreted, hence it's a lot simpler to do than with a compiled language but I'm wondering if we could express such a generic data-structure in D.

-- 
Robert M. Münch
http://www.saphirion.com
smarter | better | faster

On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 06:48:12 UTC, Robert M. Münch wrote:
> Hi, do you think it's possible to implemented something like Lua Tables (a hashed heterogeneous associative array) in D?
>
> I know that Lua is dynamic and interpreted, hence it's a lot simpler to do than with a compiled language but I'm wondering if we could express such a generic data-structure in D.

An associative array of Variant[string] ought to do the job well enough.

http://dlang.org/phobos/std_variant.html

On 2015-07-16 07:20:15 +0000, Fusxfaranto said:

> An associative array of Variant[string] ought to do the job well enough.
> 
> http://dlang.org/phobos/std_variant.html

Thanks a lot. Somehow didn't see that...

-- 
Robert M. Münch
http://www.saphirion.com
smarter | better | faster

On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 06:48:12 UTC, Robert M. Münch wrote:
> Hi, do you think it's possible to implemented something like Lua Tables (a hashed heterogeneous associative array) in D?
>
> I know that Lua is dynamic and interpreted, hence it's a lot simpler to do than with a compiled language but I'm wondering if we could express such a generic data-structure in D.

Check out LuaD[1], it is more about conversions, but you can convert to a algebraic structure, I need to revisit this now that Algebraic types can be self referencing.

1. https://github.com/JakobOvrum/LuaD

On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 07:20:16 UTC, Fusxfaranto wrote:
>
> An associative array of Variant[string] ought to do the job well enough.
>
> http://dlang.org/phobos/std_variant.html

For extra fun, you can implement the '.' style syntax pretty easily:

---
import std.variant;

struct LuaTable {
  Variant[string] _table;
  alias _table this;

  auto opDispatch(string s)() {
    return _table[s];
  }

  void opDispatch(string s, T)(T val) {
    _table[s] = Variant(val);
  }
}

unittest {
  LuaTable table;

  table.foo = 5;
  table.bar = "s";

  assert(table.foo == 5);
  assert(table.bar == "s");
}
---