This first edition was written for Lua 5.0.
While still largely relevant for later versions, there are
some differences.
The fourth edition
targets Lua 5.3 and is available at Amazon and other bookstores.
By buying the book, you also help to support the Lua project.
Programming in Lua
Part I. The Language
Chapter 5. Functions
5.3 – Named Arguments
The parameter passing mechanism in Lua is positional:
When we call a
function,
arguments match parameters by their positions.
The first argument
gives the value to the first parameter,
and so on.
Sometimes, however,
it is
useful to specify the arguments by name.
To illustrate this point,
let us
consider the function rename
(from the os library),
which renames a file.
Quite
often, we forget which name comes first,
the new or the old;
therefore, we
may want to redefine this function
to receive its two arguments by name:
-- invalid code
rename(old="temp.lua", new="temp1.lua")
Lua has no direct support for that syntax,
but we can have the same final
effect,
with a small syntax change.
The idea here is to pack all arguments into
a table
and use that table as the only argument to the function.
The special
syntax that Lua provides for function calls,
with just one table constructor as
argument, helps the trick:
rename{old="temp.lua", new="temp1.lua"}
Accordingly, we define rename with only one parameter
and get the actual
arguments from this parameter:
function rename (arg)
return os.rename(arg.old, arg.new)
end
This style of parameter passing is especially helpful when the
function has
many parameters, and most of them are optional.
For instance, a function that
creates a new window in a GUI library
may have dozens of arguments, most
of them optional,
which are best specified by names:
w = Window{ x=0, y=0, width=300, height=200,
title = "Lua", background="blue",
border = true
The Window function then has the freedom to
check for mandatory arguments,
add default values, and the like.
Assuming a primitive _Window function
that
actually creates the new window
(and that needs all arguments),
we could
define Window as follows:
function Window (options)
-- check mandatory options
if type(options.title) ~= "string" then
error("no title")
elseif type(options.width) ~= "number" then
error("no width")
elseif type(options.height) ~= "number" then
error("no height")
end
-- everything else is optional
_Window(options.title,
options.x or 0, -- default value
options.y or 0, -- default value
options.width, options.height,
options.background or "white", -- default
options.border -- default is false (nil)
end
Copyright © 2003–2004 Roberto Ierusalimschy. All rights reserved.
