Is metatable only helpful for OOP?

[Seuika (knkr)]

I was started for learning metatables and methamethods, is metatable only helpful for OOP? If not, what can I do with metatable and methamethods?

[BadbarUse]

Mmm, an interesting question, I still don’t know how to use metatables, I would like to see an answer from other developers

[varjoyTes]

You can do anything you want with metatables and metamethods

Metatables and OOP are different things.

Please so some research before posting.

A few questions about OOP / Metatables

If you can’t think of a use-case for OOP, you likely don’t need to use it. OOP is heavily overrated and only really should be used where having classes makes sense in your code-base. A metatable is simply special instructions for how to do a certain thing, nothing special. As far as I’m aware, no. No. Metatables are just instructions that are attached to a table. e.g. local array = {"a", "b", "c"} setmetatable(array, { __tostring = function() -- the tostring metamethod is useful for…

[Seuika (knkr)]

I was not mean that, there’s other methamethods like “__add, __newindex” and i want to know where can you use “Like anti exploit systems”

[varjoyTes]

Just search on google, and you find resources.

__add is when you call + operator on a metatable.
Just find on google or dev forum there are many posts like this.

[steven4547466 (Steven)]

Some meta methods are useful as a type of pseudo listener. Such as the __index and __newindex metamethods. However, they are particularly useful in OOP though because it allows you to define custom logic behind operators for custom classes like you can do in a language like c# by default using operator overloading. They can be powerful tools that can streamline your development process, whether or not you’re using OOP.

[GEILER123456]

No, you can add more functionality to tables with them.
I like to imagine metaTables set as properties of tables.

If you have two tables and want to make your script look for the thing in the other one if it doesn’t find it in the first one, you can use the __index metamethod.

If this script can’t find the element in normalTable, it will look for it’s metaTable’s __index.
In our case, __index is set to another table so it will check that table.

There are many other metamethods that can be used similarly to this example.

[GEILER123456]

With __newindex for example, you can kinda make a .Changed event for tables.

newindex fires when a new element tries to be set, so we can’t use our main table.

__add fires whenever you are trying to add something to a table that has a metaTable.

I read somewhere that it’s expensive to set functions to metamethods, I’m not sure if that’s true, if anyone knows that, please reply to this.

[debugger57]

@GEILER123456

I read somewhere that it’s expensive to set functions to metamethods, I’m not sure if that’s true, if anyone knows that, please reply to this.

Yeah I remember I read that somewhere too.