I'm just starting out in PICO-8 and messing around with OOP-style prototypal inheritance, so I tried to run the following code:

myclass = {str = "printme"}

function myclass:new(o)
 o = o or {}
 setmetatable(o,self)
 self._index = self
 return o
end

subclass = myclass:new()
print(subclass.str)

...and it prints [nil] .

Should it not print "printme"? What am I doing wrong here?

I must confess, I never use "setmetatable" to do some OOP-Things. I always do something like:

function actor(x, y, sprite)
 local self = {}
 self.x = x
 self.y = y
 self.sprite = sprite or 0

 function self.draw(self)
  spr(self.sprite, self.x, self.y)
 end

 return self
end

myactor = actor(0, 0, 1)
myactor.draw(myactor)

(Surely not optimal, but better than nothing...)

Also, don't forget that PICO-8 does not have the OOP-'Syntactic Sugar' with Dot and Colon! In Lua, the following

mytable:myfunction(x, y)

is the equivalent of

mytable.myfunction(mytable, x, y)

But on PICO-8, a Colon is just another allowed Char like any Letter...

> Also, don't forget that PICO-8 does not have the OOP-'Syntactic Sugar' with Dot and Colon!

hmm I'm not sure what led you to believe that, but I am happy to report that PICO-8 does support that colon syntactic sugar and I have used it for years :)

@FuzzyDunlop
it looks like you are just missing an underscore :) The metatable key you are trying to use is called __index

Note that you can simplify by just setting the __index for the class once; there's no point in setting it again every time a new object is created.

so you could do something like this:

myclass = {str = "printme"}
myclass.__index = myclass

function myclass:new(o)
 o = o or {}
 return setmetatable(o, self)
end

subclass = myclass:new()
print(subclass.str)

(also the setmetatable method returns the object, so I simplified that part too)

btw the code snipped you pasted might be incomplete, but I would not call that variable "subclass"; it's just an instance, not a subclass.

@kittenm4ster

God damn it. Thanks.

As for assigning the __index property inside of the "new" method, I believe there is a point to it. It allows you to create subclasses of subclasses, like so:

myclass = {str = "printme"}

function myclass:new(o)
 o = o or {}
 setmetatable(o,self)
 self.__index = self
 return o
end

subclass = myclass:new()
subclass.str = "printme2"
subclass2 = subclass:new()

print(myclass.str) --"printme1"
print(subclass2.str) --"printme2"

If you only define the __index of myclass at the top instead of inside of the "new" method, then subclass2.str will print "[nil]".

@FuzzyDunlop
haha glad to help

oh interesting; i never use any inheritance in Lua so I never realized that would be necessary for that. Thanks for the explanation.