GetParent() vs parent:

[Crissa]

I can't find this in general LUA information, probably because it's splattered all over code samples and I guess is something fairly simple.

What's the difference between GetParent().part and parentart?

-Crissa

[Xinhuan]

f:GetParent().part
f.parent.part

the difference between the 2, is that you can only use the second one, if you previously did:

f.parent = f:GetParent()

makes sense?

[Crissa]

Sure! I was wondering if that was the case.

In debugging, is there any way to display an object's name, so I'm not poking around blindly when trying to work on something that is a child of a parent of a child of a... I forgot what loop I'm in? My IDE doesn't do class traces. (it doesn't do much of anything, really ^-^)

-Crissa

[Xinhuan]

You can do

print(f)

where f is a table/frame, and Lua will print the memory address of that table/frame. If the frame was created with a global name, then

f = CreateFrame("Frame", UIParent, "Hello")
print(f:GetName()) -- will print "Hello"

will work, or it will print "nil" if the name was left out.

[Crissa]

Yeah, but I can't write Hello:GetName(), right? Because while that's the name, that's not the class name... Or is it?

-Crissa

[Xinhuan]

Originally Posted by Crissa Yeah, but I can't write Hello:GetName(), right? Because while that's the name, that's not the class name... Or is it? -Crissa

Technically you can, because Hello would be a global variable. The 3rd argument to CreateFrame is the global name to be given to the frame, and GetName() returns the same string.

Global variables can be accessed directly, or in the _G table, so

Hello:GetName()
_G["Hello"]:GetName()
_G.Hello:GetName()

would all accomplish the same thing, which is to return the string "Hello".

There are no "classes" in Lua, but you can attach tables with metatables to mimic class-like behavior (all frames have a frame metatable, which defines the functions like GetName()).