syntax for calling modules oddity (hump timer)

[parallax7d]

I'm looking through some code of other games, and notice that one is using the hump timer module.

I thought the normal way of calling it was something like this:

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Timer.addPeriodic(10, function()
  ghost:stop()
end)

But I see in this code they do this:

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TIMER = Timer()

and their calls are like this:

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TIMER:addPeriodic(10, function()
  ghost:stop()
end)

I'm fairly new to method calls, and I'm wondering what reasons someone would have for doing this? And also, how does it actually work? Is it because hump.timer has a __call meta method that allows it to be called like a function? Honestly, after staring at the hump timer module I can't wrap my head around it's return statement.

[Ranguna259]

In the particular case, the game you were looking at simply used : for aesthetics, I actually prefer to use : over . in some cases.

[parallax7d]

Oh, ok. I thought I was missing some fundamental thing about working with modules. So it's just a personal preference, there isn't any advantage to it?

[Ranguna259]

No, not at all. BTW sorry for the late reply

[Kingdaro]

In this case, it wasn't "just for aesthetics". That timer library specifically is part of vrld's hump library. The differentiation here is that, when using the dot, you are calling a function on the required library itself, and when using the colon, you are calling a function on an instance of the library. The difference between these two methods is either having just one place to use the library, or multiple versions of the library to be used and updated separately from one another, usually for organization and functionality.

For instance, you could create two different instances of the library, one to always be updated, and the other to only be updated while the game is unpaused.

[Ranguna259]

Ah since I didn't understand the nature of the lib I assumed it was just for the looks