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It's not "corruption" when you don't understand the semantics of the functions you're calling—ipairs stops at the smallest integer index that doesn't have a value. You can still find that the key 3 exists with pairs; you can't find the key 2, because it's not in the table.

The language just doesn't distinguish "key present with no value" in a table, which is frankly a bizarre thing to want with typechecking in the same breath.

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You make a good point: since "pairs" returns all the values as it should, calling the table "corrupted" may be too harsh. It's been so long now I can't recall why the original code I found this problem in used "ipairs" instead of "pairs". It's simply not safe to use "ipairs" on a table containing a nil and the code that did that was wrong.

I think working with newer languages like Typescript have made me unsatisfied with languages like Lua which provide no clear way to prevent this sort of mistake, so I like that dialects like Pluto are showing ways Lua could be improved.

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