{{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 sp ...
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 interpreted ...
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 comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...
or
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
. In most cases, specific
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
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 ...