Luau Substring with Brackets Request

[krissynull]

With the addition of compound assignment operators would it be possible to add the ability to perform substrings with brackets. For example:

"Hello World!"[1:5] = "Hello"

[Halalaluyafail3 (FindFirstChild)]

We can already get a substring with string.sub, is there any reason a substring operator would be better?

Using : for this would be impossible, considering something like this is already valid

local a = {b=function()return"char"end}
local char = ("abc")[a:b()]

Would a:b() call method b on a and index the string with the result or would it get a substring from the value of a to the result of calling b? Something else would have to be used, probably , or |.

And how would this work with metamethods? Would it call __index with another argument or would there be a new __substring metamethod?

[krissynull]

It’d simply be for convenience such as how this would’ve been possible before compound assignment operators were added but is more convenient now with them.

a = 5
a = a + 2

compared to

a = 5
a += 2

It also doesn’t need to be a colon but anything that’d allow substrings to be used more quickly would be simply for convenience.

[sjr04 (uep)]

I think compound assignments were a special case because they are present in practically every other language and it makes sense. Could you explain why string.sub is inconvenient? You can also use : notation to call the string library functions as methods on strings because all strings share the same metatable with an __index field that points to string.

[nooneisback]

In what way is "Hello World!"[1:5] more convenient than ("Hello World!"):sub(1,5)?

[krissynull]

Ah I forgot that was possible to do with strings. Thank you!