Re: Its okey or not?

On Mon, 9 Feb 2026 at 11:21, blogdron (BLOGDRON) <[email protected]> wrote:

> This behavior is probably well-known, but I've never encountered it before. I
> thought if a type received a nil, it would simply return a nil, but
> sometimes there's literally nothing there, not a nil. Now I'm paranoid
> about wrapping everything in parentheses, even if the function returns only
> one value :D  haha and/or if function return nothing im force wrote return
> nil
>

i think you diagnosed it right: it boils down to the difference between nil
and "no arguments".

in this case it's a bit obscured because of the behaviour of string.byte()
on empty strings.  of course, it's mathematically pleasing that the number
or return values is the number of bytes in the input string.  and an empty
string has 0 bytes.   this helps a lot on the case where you want to pass
the results to a vararg function, or store in a table.  when passing to a
function with a function with a required number of args... then yes, you
get issues.

similarly, since a variable (or a function argument) can't hold "nothing",
the difference between `type()` and `type(x)` is almost a syntactic one;  i
guess that's the reason to raise an error instead of returning a
`nil`,<errstring> pair.

so, is there any way to make it easier for a "casual" user that doesn't
want to go into the language design of Lua?  i can't think of any right now.

-- 
Javier

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