I knew my code was definitely not right, I just had absolutely no clue what the next step would be or how to look it up (as I had tried, some time ago, to find any example in the Godot/GDScript documentation that matched what I was seeing there, and came up blank).
var gold = 5
var formatPython1 = { gold : gold } # creates { 5 : 5}
var formatPython2 = { 'gold' : gold } # creates { 'gold' : 5}
var formatLua = { gold = gold } # creates { 'gold' : 5}
var emptyDict = {}
emptyDict[gold] = gold # creates { 5 : 5}
*tearing my hair out*
okay so
let me get this straight:
the Lua format lets you make a string without using quotes, that becomes a string in the code and gets referenced as a string???
never in a million years would I have made that leap on my own
this is my "dot operator" moment for this language
(actually it's more like... this language has broken one of the Core Concepts of every language I have studied thus far (aside from perhaps HTML), which is that strings go inside quotes and non-strings stay outside quotes and never the twain shall meet)
Thank you so much for laying it out so succinctly so I can compare the formats. That helps a hell of a lot, and I much appreciate it.