GearSwap - syntax clarification

[kokyrone]

What's the T do here? T{'Idle','Resting'}:contains(new) Versus or compared to the S here? S{'Warp','Warp II'}:contains(spell.english)

I'm assuming this was maybe covered in "Special tables" in the Lua section of the GearSwap tutorial?

[Byrth]

T and S are both "constructors" for the tables and sets libraries that Arcon wrote (windower/addons/libs/tables.lua and windower/addons/libs/sets.lua). There is, additionally, a Lists option that is used sometimes (windower/addons/libs/lists.lua)

In Lua, these two statements are functionally identical:

• T{'Idle','Resting'} vs T({'Idle','Resting'}
• print'hi' vs print('hi')

So your examples are calling functions T() and S() (and L() for the lists library) that construct and return a customized Lua table with added methods (like :contains()).

• T() is designed to be used when you want a mapping of specified Key to Value
• S() is designed to be used when you want to quickly check whether a given value is a member of the set. In this case, the key is the relevant quantity (like 'Warp') and the value is simply true.
• L() is designed to be used when you want to organize n Values and don't care about the keys but do care about the order. The keys are, then, 1 to n.

These constructors are used for conceptual simplicity rather than efficiency. I'm not sure they're much more computationally efficient than manually making tables as I describe above, but modern hardware is going to make any minor inefficiencies they introduce nearly undetectable in most situations.