Tutorial: The difference between a . and a : when declaring functions in Lua

OZApps · January 2012

This is one from the series of tutorials available on our site, many of the earlier tutorials were aimed towards a Mexican beer type framework, now they are more general in nature and applicable to most frameworks that use Lua.

http://howto.oz-apps.com/2012/01/safely-create-member-functions-in-lua.html

MikeHart · January 2012

A little bit difficult to understand for me but I think I got. Thanks!

ar2rsawseen · January 2012

Well yeah, I was also confused with that, but then I understood the idea from string object

For example:
for each method in string object we can pass string to it

string.find("Hello Lua user", "Lua")

or we can use this function for strings directly, because they are also string objects

local str = "Hello Lua user"
str:find("Lua")

As you see in second example, we didn't have to pass string value again, because using ":" will pass string itself as first argument.

I would say it is similar to having static and instance method in one

OZApps · January 2012

well, each one of us has different ways to learn, glad that the end result was the same, the journey and the experiences might have been different.

When writing an article for the other framework, most users do not even know what a variable is, where as most users here are ones that write plug-ins etc. So, it is difficult ...

atilim · January 2012

Thank you OZApps

Also I want to add a little info:
Although x:foo(y) is same with x.foo(x, y), x:foo(y) is _a little bit_ faster because Lua VM has a special opcode for : operator.

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