2.14. Delegation

Squirrel supports implicit delegation. Every table or userdata can have a parent table (delegate). A parent table is a normal table that allows the definition of special behaviors for his child. When a table (or userdata) is indexed with a key that doesn’t correspond to one of its slots, the interpreter automatically delegates the get (or set) operation to its parent.:

Entity <- {
}

function Entity::DoStuff()
{
    ::print(_name);
}

local newentity = {
    _name="I'm the new entity"
}
newentity.setdelegate(Entity)

newentity.DoStuff(); //prints "I'm the new entity"

The delegate of a table can be retreived through built-in method table.getdelegate().:

local thedelegate = newentity.getdelegate();