Also, an interesting observation, the built-in # operator cannot determine the length of a table or a subset of a table that is used as a dictionary. For example:
#{1,2,3,a=4,5}
will yield 4. notice that elements appended after a key-val pair will be indexed after the last known continuous index
Just as well
example = {1,2,3,4,5}
table.remove(example, 3)
#example
will yield 4 as the elements 4 and 5 are automatically shifted.