Blog Index

Sam Trenholme’s blog

On Cofnas; Lua sorter

August 26, 2026

I summarize why I feel Cofnas’ witch hunt of Arday was racially motivated. I also show an improved Lua sorted table iterator.

Cofas’ attack on Arday

Nathan Cofnas has been suspended for engaging in a witch hunt against a Black professor who apparently killed himself.

I think it’s safe to say that Cofnas would not have placed the late Jason Arday under this much scrutiny if he were White. Indeed, Cofnas was fired from his previous job because of his offensive views on race.

I will link to Cofnas’s investigation into Arday’s history.

The, shall we say, racially motivated people (or are they AIs; hard to tell on today’s internet) at The Motte are, as expected, up in arms about Cofnas’ suspension.

A better Lua table sorter

Here is an updated version of sPairs() which won’t raise an error if the table uses functions, booleans, or tables as keys. Like previous version of sPairs(), this function is public domain:

-- Like pairs() but sorted
function sPairs(inTable, sFunc)
  if not sFunc then
    sFunc = function(a, b)
      local ta = type(a)
      local tb = type(b)
      if(ta == tb) then
        if ta == 'number'
          then return a < b
        end
        return tostring(a) <
               tostring(b)
      end
      return ta < tb
    end
  end
  local keyList = {}
  local index = 1
  for k,_ in pairs(inTable) do
    table.insert(keyList,k)
  end
  table.sort(keyList, sFunc)
  return function()
    key = keyList[index]
    index = index + 1
    return key, inTable[key]
  end
end

Example usage of the above function:

a={z=1,y=2,c=3,w=4}
for k,v in sPairs(a) do
 print(k,v)
end

With a sort function that reverse sorts the elements (assuming all elements are of the same type):

a={z=1,y=2,c=3,w=4}
function revS(a,b)
  return a>b
end
for k,v in sPairs(a,revS) do
  print(k,v)
end

This improved sorter’s default sort function will no longer raise an error if using unusual table keys (tables, functions, booleans, etc.):

a={}
b={}
a[true]=1
a[function() return 1 end]=2
a[b]=3
a[4]=4
a["5"]=5
for k,v in sPairs(a) do
  print(k,v)
end