Passing table without parentheses in lua giving error

Question

The following gives me an error 'syntax error near 'Person' even though in the faq (http://www.luafaq.org/) it stats: "so it cleverly uses the fact that Lua will accept single function arguments without parentheses if the argument is a string or a table"

function class(cls)
   return cls
end

Person = {}

class Person

print(Person)

What am I missing here? If I change class Person to class "Person" it works, but the faq stats it should work with both strings and tables.

Yu Hao · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-22 13:56:43Z

6

The parentheses can only be omitted when there is only one argument, and the argument is a string literal or a table constructor.

In your example, syntactically, you can call class 'foo' or class {}, but not class Person, because Person is a variable, not a table constructor.

answered Jan 22, 2015 at 13:56

Yu Hao

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2 Comments

user441521 Over a year ago

Ah interesting. The FAQ didn't say table constructor but just table. That's a bummer. Thanks.

lhf Over a year ago

@user441521, the manual says explicitly: args ::= tableconstructor at lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#3.4.9 and lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.4.10.

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