Programming and Scripting :: Lua strings

Reading through the Lua 5.1 docs I see something I didn't notice in earlier versions. They mention the # operator, which gives the length of a string:

Code Sample

len=#s

What I'm curious about is the difference between using this and using the string.len() function:

Code Sample

len=string.len(s)

Any ideas?

Maybe it's just a new 'shortcut'. Every coder loves those

original here.