What's the difference between table.insert(t, i) and t[#t+1] = i?

Question

In Lua, there seem to be two ways of appending an element to an array:

table.insert(t, i)

and

t[#t+1] = i

Whi

Answer 1

The following is slightly on the amusing side but possibly with a grain of aesthetics. Even though there are obvious reasons that mytable:operation() is not supplied like mystring:operation(), one can easily roll one's own variant, and get a third notation if desired.

Table = {}
Table.__index = table                     

function Table.new()
   local t = {}
   setmetatable(t, Table)
   return t
end

mytable = Table.new()
mytable:insert('Hello')
mytable:insert('World')
for _, s in ipairs(mytable) do
   print(s)
end