I'm trying to implement a simple C++ function, which checks a syntax of Lua script. For that I'm using Lua's compiler function luaL_loadbufferx()
and checking its return value afterwards.
Recently, I have ran into a problem, because the code, that I thought should be marked invalid, was not detected and instead the script failed later at a runtime (eg. in lua_pcall()
).
Example Lua code (can be tested on official Lua demo):
function myfunc()
return "everyone"
end
-- Examples of unexpected behaviour:
-- The following lines pass the compile time check without errors.
print("Hello " .. myfunc() "!") -- Runtime error: attempt to call a string value
print("Hello " .. myfunc() {1,2,3}) -- Runtime error: attempt to call a string value
-- Other examples:
-- The following lines contain examples of invalid syntax, which IS detected by compiler.
print("Hello " myfunc() .. "!") -- Compile error: ')' expected near 'myfunc'
print("Hello " .. myfunc() 5) -- Compile error: ')' expected near '5'
print("Hello " .. myfunc() .. ) -- Compile error: unexpected symbol near ')'
The goal is obviously to catch all syntax errors at compile time. So my questions are:
luaL_loadbufferx()
is faulty in this particular example?lua_pcall()
.Note: I'm using Lua version 5.3.4 (manual here).
Thank you very much for your help.
Both myfunc() "!"
and myfunc(){1,2,3}
are valid Lua expressions.
Lua allows calls of the form exp string. See functioncall
and prefixexp
in the Syntax of Lua.
So myfunc() "!"
is a valid function call that calls whatever myfunc
returns and call it with the string "!"
.
The same thing happens for a call of the form exp table-literal.