Lua has no class but dot operator?

Question

If Lua has no class, why does it have a dot operator?

Eg. In string.find, is string a class with static/class method find?

Answer 1

In your example, find is an entry in the table string

It is syntactic sugar for string["find"]

It could be defined like so:

local string = {
  "find" = function()
    -- find stuff
  end
}

or

local string = {}
string["find"] = function()
  -- find stuff
end

or

local string = {}
string.find = function()
  -- find stuff
end