Using Lua reserved words in function names

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#1

Hey there, pretty simple question.

Is it possible to name a function a Lua reserved word, such as print, or next?

I tried using quotation marks and apostrophes (like 'next' or "next"), however it still returned an error. No big deal if it isn’t possible, but it’s more for organization’s sake.

#2

print and next are names, not reserved keywords. in, and, and others are reserved.

function print() end -- works

function and() end -- does not

All reserved keywords are under this section: Lua 5.3 Reference Manual

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#3

No, you cannot.
Also print and next are just names of builtin functions, they’re not reserved keywords.

1 Like
#4

Still underlines in orange, any way to get rid of it, thinking that’s what mislead me. No big deal if it isn’t possible. Also didn’t know that was possible, thanks!

#5

The orange underline is probably just a warning if you are using a function name that is the same as a predefined global or such. You can hover over it to see what it’s complaining about.

2 Likes
#6

It indicates that it’ll overridden. For some reason it’s not underlined when doing local function print() instead of function print(), may that’ll work?

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#7

Yeah, this is the warning, it says to consider changing it to local. Too bad there isn’t a way to ignore it as you can with MS Word or something.
Screen Shot 2020-06-11 at 8.24.58 PM

#8

You can follow the suggestion by the editor and write local function next() instead. In fact, all of your functions should already be declared local anyways.

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#9

Sometimes it can cause an issue like this (assuming I wanted recursion to happen):

Screen Shot 2020-06-11 at 8.58.53 PM

#10

You can forward declare locals, too.

local number2

local function number1() number2() end

function number2() end -- omit `local`, because it was forward declared
2 Likes
#11

Wait, so you can use that local “variable” as a function? This is news to me.

#12

Doing local x will just localize x to that scope, while function x() will set the value of x to that function. If you were to run number1() before defining number2 as a variable, it’d still error since number2 doesn’t have a value yet.

3 Likes
#13

Functions in Lua are stored as variables anyway, meaning you can do stuff like this:

local oldPrint = print

print = function(...)
	oldPrint("Overwritten print function!")
	warn(...)
end

print("hey")
1 Like