{{For, the object prototype mechanism in Lua, Lua (programming language)#Object-oriented programming
A metatable is the section of a
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...
or other
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...
holding structure that is designated to hold data that will act as
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
...
has been written to read the data from the metatables and perform different actions depending on the data it finds.
See also
*
Magic number (programming)
In computer programming, a magic number is any of the following:
* A unique value with unexplained meaning or multiple occurrences which could (preferably) be replaced with a named constant
* A constant numerical or text value used to identify a ...