Improved Iteration

Pluto improves iteration in a few ways.

Generalized Iteration

It's redundant to call the pairs function for simple iteration. This action is now optional, and handled by the virtual machine if the function is absent.

New Code

local t = { 1, 2, 3, "hello", "world" }
for key, value in t do
    print(key, value)
end

When you omit the function from the loop preparation, pairs is implicitly inserted. So, that code is identical to this:

Old Code

local t = { 1, 2, 3, "hello", "world" }
for key, value in pairs(t) do
    print(key, value)
end

This is compatible with for-loop optimizations.

caution

The bytecode of this feature is not backwards-compatible with Lua.