Question

Javascript delete keyword deletes a named variable slot from nearest execution environment which it defined.
What’s the equivalent in Lua?

Answer 1

var = nil

Environments in Lua are tables, and tables cannot contain nil value – assigning nil to a key in a table effectively deletes that key from the table.

Here is a quote from “Programming in Lua”:

Like global variables, table fields
evaluate to nil if they are not
initialized. Also like global
variables, you can assign nil to a
table field to delete it. That is not
a coincidence: Lua stores global
variables in ordinary tables