Re: Lua syntax ambiguity

It was thus said that the Great 'Martin Eden' via lua-l once stated:
> Hi Sean,
> 
> On 2026-08-18 20:36, Sean Conner wrote:
> >   What are you doing that requires this level of detail?
> Just printing tables.

  Okay.  I have a similar function.  Two actually, one to dump to a string
(which has been occasionally useful) and a second one that dumps to stdout.

> >   That aside, it sounds like you have some form of AST that you want to 
> >   turn
> >into textual Lua (possibly with a minimum of extra space for some reason).
> >Per your example:
> >
> >	t={['a']=1}
> >
> >   At some point you have a string.  By what criteria are you using to 
> >   write
> >a string as [[...]]?  Why not "..."?  Or '...'?  Avoid the issue entirely.

> Objective is not "avoid issue and make job done". Objective is
> "deal with it. Preferably nicely".

  I mean, how does your code determine which quoting method to use?  In mine
[1], I just use double quotes, and will escape control codes or byte values
larger than 126.  For example:

> dump("x",x)
x =
{
  bar = C_FUNCTION,
  file = file (0xcbc720),
  [true] = false,
  ["one\ntwo"] = 12.000000,
  foo = "1\n2\t3\v4\a5\000\001\002b\226\141\133",
  ["[[a]]"] = 2.000000,
  x = x,
}

  I sidestepped the issue of using [[...]] and '...' by not using them [2].

  -spc

[1]	https://github.com/spc476/lua-conmanorg/blob/fa5bcdbdcc0ceeeadd238a470c063f8b843c11cd/lua/table.lua#L78

[2]	Yes, some values are not valid Lua (like "bar = C_FUNCTION") but
	some Lua values are not easy to deal with (userdata, functions and
	threads come to mind).  I was able to solve this somewhat with my
	CBOR [3] implemetation, but never published it.  Also, this means
	that some tables can't be properly round-tripped with my code; that
	doesn't bother me too much and hasn't been an issue.

[3]	Concise Binary Object Representation:

		defined: <https://cbor.io/>
		my module: https://github.com/spc476/CBOR

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