class

Methods on every class.

Call these with .$

A class's members and its built-in methods share one namespace, and a member wins. A class that declares a field called rawget, tostring or weakref hides the method of that name, and the ordinary call then fails with attempt to call 'string' or whatever the field happens to hold.

Writing the call as obj.$rawget(key) reaches the built-in type method directly and never looks at the members, so the class declaration cannot break it. Plain obj.rawget(key) is fine for a class you wrote yourself.

See the .$ operator and types.Table.

Functions

__merge	pure (table\|class).__merge(other: table\|instance\|class, ...): any	Builds a new class out of the class it is called on plus every argument given, and returns it. The class it is called on is not changed.
__update	(table\|class).__update(other: table\|instance\|class, ...): any	Copies every own member of each argument into the class it is called on, and returns that same class. Unlike `__merge`, nothing new is allocated.
acall	class.acall(args: array): any	Creates a new instance of the class, passing it the constructor arguments packed into an array. Equivalent to `call`, only with the arguments collected into one array instead of listed one by one.
call	class.call(...): any	Creates a new instance of the class and runs its constructor, the same as writing `ClassName(...)`. Exists so a class value obtained indirectly (through a variable, a table slot, or `getclass()`) can still be instantiated through a uniform `.call(...)` spelling shared with functions.
clone	clone(): any	Always fails. `clone` is one of the type-methods every built-in delegate carries, but the VM's generic clone operation explicitly refuses a class.
getbase	pure class.getbase(): any	Returns the class this class inherits from.
getfuncinfos	class.getfuncinfos(): any	Describes the class's `_call` metamethod, the same way `function.getfuncinfos` describes a plain function.
getmetamethod	class.getmetamethod(name: string): any	Looks up one of the class's metamethods by name, without triggering it.
hasindex	pure class.hasindex(key): any	Tests whether `key` names a member of the class.
instance	class.instance(): any	Creates a new instance of the class without running its constructor.
is_frozen	is_frozen(): any	Reports whether this reference to the class was frozen with `freeze()`.
lock	class.lock(): any	Locks the class immediately, without creating an instance.
newmember	class.newmember(key, value, ...): any	Adds a member to the class, optionally as a static one.
pacall	class.pacall(args: array): any	Same as `acall`, except a failure does not invoke the VM's registered error callback.
pcall	class.pcall(...): any	Same as `call`, except a failure does not invoke the VM's registered error callback.
rawget	pure class.rawget(key): any	Reads the value stored at `key` in the class's own member table.
rawin	pure class.rawin(key): any	Tests whether `key` names a member of the class.
rawset	class.rawset(key, value): any	Creates or replaces a member of the class, and unlike `newmember`, wires `key` and `value` to the roles their names suggest.
tostring	tostring(): any	Converts the class to a string.
weakref	weakref(): any	Returns a weak reference to the class.