How do I append to a table in Lua

I'm trying to figure out the equivalent of:

foo = []
foo << "bar"
foo << "baz"

I don't want to have to come up with an incrementing index. Is there an easy way to do this?

You are looking for the insert function, found in the table section of the main library.

foo = {}
table.insert(foo, "bar")
table.insert(foo, "baz")

foo = {}
foo[#foo+1]="bar"
foo[#foo+1]="baz"

This works because the # operator computes the length of the list. The empty list has length 0, etc.

If you're using Lua 5.3+, then you can do almost exactly what you wanted:

foo = {}
setmetatable(foo, {	__shl = function (t,v) t[#t+1]=v end })
_= foo << "bar"
_= foo << "baz"

Expressions are not statements in Lua and they need to be used somehow.

I'd personally make use of the table.insert function:

table.insert(a,"b");

This saves you from having to iterate over the whole table therefore saving valuable resources such as memory and time.