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I've found some places on the web saying that operators in Lua are overloadable but I can't seem to find any example. Can someone provide an example of, say, overloading the + operator to work like the .. operator works for string concatenation? EDIT 1: to Alexander Gladysh and RBerteig : If operator overloading only works when both operands are the same type and changing this behavior wouldn't be easy, then how come the following code works? (I don't mean any offense, I just started learning this language): printf = function(fmt, ...) io.write(string.format(fmt, ...)) end Set = {} Set.mt = {} -- metatable for sets function Set.new (t) local set = {} setmetatable(set, Set.mt) for _, l in ipairs(t) do set[l] = true end return set end function Set.union (a,b) -- THIS IS THE PART THAT MANAGES OPERATOR OVERLOADING WITH OPERANDS OF DIFFERENT TYPES -- if user built new set using: new_set = some_set + some_number if type(a) == "table" and type(b) == "number" then print("building set...") local mixedset = Set.new{} for k in pairs(a) do mixedset[k] = true end mixedset[b] = true return mixedset -- elseif user built new set using: new_set = some_number + some_set elseif type(b) == "table" and type(a) == "number" then print("building set...") local mixedset = Set.new{} for k in pairs(b) do mixedset[k] = true end mixedset[a] = true return mixedset end if getmetatable(a) ~= Set.mt or getmetatable(b) ~= Set.mt then error("attempt to 'add' a set with a non-set value that is also not a number", 2) end local res = Set.new{} for k in pairs(a) do res[k] = true end for k in pairs(b) do res[k] = true end return res end function Set.tostring (set) local s = "{" local sep = "" for e in pairs(set) do s = s .. sep .. e

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