[Hiketeia]

I'm missing something here... transitioning from other languages to lua and I've got a gap somewhere I was hoping you could point it out to me and give me some reference material to fill in the gap...

I don't seem to be understanding tables correctly -- mostly the '#' meta and iterating over them. Here is some code:

function testTableAdd(count)
   local t = {}
   for i = 1, count do
      print("Adding "..i)
      t[i] = "Yes please ".. i
      print(#t)
   end
   print("We counted "..#t.." times")
   return t
end
print(testTableAdd(5))
function testTableAddOutOfOrder()
   local t = {}
   t[3] = "three"
   t[5] = "five"
   t[15] = "wow"
   print("We counted "..#t.." times")
   return t
end
print(testTableAddOutOfOrder())

I was expecting "We counted 5 times" and "We counted 3 times", but the 2nd one says 0 -- but it has the 3 entries.

For the first I can iterate through them with a for i = 1, #t do but the second one that doesn't work since the # is 0. Using a 'pairs' do I got through the second. Hmmm... typing it out it is making more sense why the second loop was failing, because the indexes were different. But some background would still help.

I wonder in my bigger case if I should just fill in the gaps with nils and that might just solve my problem...

Is there a way to add to the table, just to the end of it?

I'm used to

t << 'new entry'

in something like ruby.

Thanks.