regarding that debate nullable and I had a while ago over map() being in lua, i wanted to do a test to see if a mapping function would be faster or slower than using pairs().
i personally prefer, in terms of writing scripts, to use pairs() over a mapping function, but it could be useful if I had some functions defined beforehand to use with map(). i tested using map() with anonymous functions, and defined functions, vs. pairs().
this script creates a table with 10,000 numbers in it, and each function would write all of the numbers, one after another, on one line, with a space in between each number.
http://pastebin.com/EdmbJ5NPit seems as though pairs pulled through more than map() did in terms of speed. in situations where you don't have tables as large as this one, speed might not matter, but if you were, say, creating a game where every frame in the game had to update as fast as possible, it's important in order to achieve the highest framerate.