Lua (programming language)
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Lua ( ; from meaning ''
moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width ...
'') is a lightweight, high-level,
multi-paradigm programming language Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms. Some paradigms are concerned mainly with implications for the execution model of the language, suc ...
designed primarily for embedded use in applications. Lua is
cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...
, since the interpreter of compiled
bytecode Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (norma ...
is written in ANSI C, and Lua has a relatively simple C API to embed it into applications. Lua originated in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most
procedural programming Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming, based on the concept of the '' procedure call''. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carri ...
languages, but more complicated or domain-specific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its
speed In everyday use and in kinematics, the speed (commonly referred to as ''v'') of an object is the magnitude of the change of its position over time or the magnitude of the change of its position per unit of time; it is thus a scalar quantity ...
,
portability Portability may refer to: *Portability (social security), the portability of social security benefits * Porting, the ability of a computer program to be ported from one system to another in computer science ** Software portability, the portability ...
, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.


History

Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. From 1977 until 1992, Brazil had a policy of strong trade barriers (called a market reserve) for computer hardware and software. In that atmosphere, Tecgraf's clients could not afford, either politically or financially, to buy customized software from abroad. Those reasons led Tecgraf to implement the basic tools it needed from scratch. Lua's predecessors were the data-description/configuration languages ''SOL'' (Simple Object Language) and ''DEL'' (data-entry language). They had been independently developed at Tecgraf in 1992–1993 to add some flexibility into two different projects (both were interactive graphical programs for engineering applications at Petrobras company). There was a lack of any flow-control structures in SOL and DEL, and Petrobras felt a growing need to add full programming power to them. In ''The Evolution of Lua'', the language's authors wrote: Lua 1.0 was designed in such a way that its object constructors, being then slightly different from the current light and flexible style, incorporated the data-description syntax of SOL (hence the name Lua: ''Sol'' meaning "Sun" in Portuguese, and ''Lua'' meaning "Moon"). Lua syntax for control structures was mostly borrowed from
Modula The Modula programming language is a descendant of the Pascal language. It was developed in Switzerland, at ETH Zurich, in the mid-1970s by Niklaus Wirth, the same person who designed Pascal. The main innovation of Modula over Pascal is a m ...
(if, while, repeat/until), but also had taken influence from
CLU The term CLU can refer to: Organizations * California Lutheran University * Claremont Lincoln University * Communion and Liberation – University * Czech Lacrosse Union Other uses * CLU (gene), the gene for clusterin * CLU (programming l ...
(multiple assignments and multiple returns from function calls, as a simpler alternative to reference parameters or explicit pointers), C++ ("neat idea of allowing a local variable to be declared only where we need it"), SNOBOL and AWK ( associative arrays). In an article published in '' Dr. Dobb's Journal'', Lua's creators also state that LISP and Scheme with their single, ubiquitous data-structure mechanism (the
list A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby uni ...
) were a major influence on their decision to develop the table as the primary data structure of Lua. Lua semantics have been increasingly influenced by Scheme over time, especially with the introduction of anonymous functions and full lexical scoping. Several features were added in new Lua versions. Versions of Lua prior to version 5.0 were released under a license similar to the
BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...
. From version 5.0 onwards, Lua has been licensed under the MIT License. Both are permissive free software licences and are almost identical.


Features

Lua is commonly described as a " multi-paradigm" language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types. Lua does not contain explicit support for inheritance, but allows it to be implemented with metatables. Similarly, Lua allows programmers to implement namespaces, classes, and other related features using its single table implementation; first-class functions allow the employment of many techniques from
functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...
; and full lexical scoping allows fine-grained information hiding to enforce the principle of least privilege. In general, Lua strives to provide simple, flexible meta-features that can be extended as needed, rather than supply a feature-set specific to one programming paradigm. As a result, the base language is
light Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the human eye. Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), corresponding to frequencies of 750–420 te ...
—the full reference interpreter is only about 247  kB compiled—and easily adaptable to a broad range of applications. A dynamically typed language intended for use as an extension language or
scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripti ...
, Lua is compact enough to fit on a variety of host platforms. It supports only a small number of atomic data structures such as
boolean Any kind of logic, function, expression, or theory based on the work of George Boole is considered Boolean. Related to this, "Boolean" may refer to: * Boolean data type, a form of data with only two possible values (usually "true" and "false" ...
values, numbers (double-precision floating point and 64-bit
integer An integer is the number zero (), a positive natural number (, , , etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign ( −1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language ...
s by default), and strings. Typical data structures such as arrays, sets,
lists A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby union ...
, and records can be represented using Lua's single native data structure, the table, which is essentially a heterogeneous associative array. Lua implements a small set of advanced features such as first-class functions, garbage collection, closures, proper tail calls, coercion (automatic conversion between string and number values at run time), coroutines (cooperative multitasking) and dynamic module loading.


Syntax

The classic
"Hello, World!" program A "Hello, World!" program is generally a computer program that ignores any input and outputs or displays a message similar to "Hello, World!". A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustr ...
can be written as follows: print("Hello, World!") or as: print 'Hello, World!' A comment in Lua starts with a double-hyphen and runs to the end of the line, similar to Ada, Eiffel, Haskell, SQL and VHDL. Multi-line strings and comments are adorned with double square brackets. The factorial function is implemented as a function in this example: function factorial(n) local x = 1 for i = 2, n do x = x * i end return x end


Control flow

Lua has one type of
conditional Conditional (if then) may refer to: * Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y * Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a ...
test: if then end with optional else and elseif then execution control constructs. The generic if then end statement requires all three keywords: if condition then --statement body end The else keyword may be added with an accompanying statement block to control execution when the if condition evaluates to false: if condition then --statement body else --statement body end Execution may also be controlled according to multiple conditions using the elseif then keywords: if condition then --statement body elseif condition then --statement body else -- optional --optional default statement body end Lua has four types of conditional loops: the while loop, the repeat loop (similar to a do while loop), the numeric for loop, and the generic for loop. --condition = true while condition do --statements end repeat --statements until condition for i = first, last, delta do --delta may be negative, allowing the for loop to count down or up --statements --example: print(i) end The generic for loop: for key, value in pairs(_G) do print(key, value) end would iterate over the table _G using the standard iterator function pairs, until it returns nil. Loops can also be nested (put inside of another loop). local grid = for y, row in pairs(grid) do for x, value in pairs(row) do print(x, y, value) end end


Functions

Lua's treatment of functions as first-class values is shown in the following example, where the print function's behavior is modified: do local oldprint = print -- Store current print function as oldprint function print(s) -- Redefine print function. The usual print function can still be used through oldprint. The new one has only one argument. oldprint(s

"foo" and "bar" or s) end end
Any future calls to print will now be routed through the new function, and because of Lua's lexical scoping, the old print function will only be accessible by the new, modified print. Lua also supports closures, as demonstrated below: function addto(x) -- Return a new function that adds x to the argument return function(y) -- When we refer to the variable x, which is outside the current scope and whose lifetime would be shorter than that of this anonymous function, Lua creates a closure. return x + y end end fourplus = addto(4) print(fourplus(3)) -- Prints 7 --This can also be achieved by calling the function in the following way: print(addto(4)(3)) -- This is because we are calling the returned function from 'addto(4)' with the argument '3' directly. This also helps to reduce data cost and up performance if being called iteratively. A new closure for the variable x is created every time addto is called, so that each new anonymous function returned will always access its own x parameter. The closure is managed by Lua's garbage collector, just like any other object.


Tables

Tables are the most important data structures (and, by design, the only built-in composite data type) in Lua and are the foundation of all user-created types. They are associative arrays with addition of automatic numeric key and special syntax. A table is a collection of key and data pairs, where the data is referenced by key; in other words, it is a hashed heterogeneous associative array. Tables are created using the constructor syntax. a_table = -- Creates a new, empty table Tables are always passed by reference (see Call by sharing). A key (index) can be any value except nil and NaN, including functions. a_table = -- Creates a new table, with one entry mapping "x" to the number 10. print(a_table x" -- Prints the value associated with the string key, in this case 10. b_table = a_table b_table x"= 20 -- The value in the table has been changed to 20. print(b_table x" -- Prints 20. print(a_table x" -- Also prints 20, because a_table and b_table both refer to the same table. A table is often used as structure (or
record A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, ...
) by using strings as keys. Because such use is very common, Lua features a special syntax for accessing such fields. point = -- Create new table print(point x" -- Prints 10 print(point.x) -- Has exactly the same meaning as line above. The easier-to-read dot notation is just syntactic sugar. By using a table to store related functions, it can act as a namespace. Point = Point.new = function(x, y) return -- return end Point.set_x = function(point, x) point.x = x -- point x"= x; end Tables are automatically assigned a numerical key, enabling them to be used as an array data type. The first automatic index is 1 rather than 0 as it is for many other programming languages (though an explicit index of 0 is allowed). A numeric key 1 is distinct from a string key "1". array = -- Indices are assigned automatically. print(array -- Prints "b". Automatic indexing in Lua starts at 1. print(#array) -- Prints 4. # is the length operator for tables and strings. array = "z" -- Zero is a legal index. print(#array) -- Still prints 4, as Lua arrays are 1-based. The length of a table t is defined to be any integer index n such that t /code> is not nil and t +1/code> is nil; moreover, if t /code> is nil, n can be zero. For a regular array, with non-nil values from 1 to a given n, its length is exactly that n, the index of its last value. If the array has "holes" (that is, nil values between other non-nil values), then #t can be any of the indices that directly precedes a nil value (that is, it may consider any such nil value as the end of the array). ExampleTable = print(ExampleTable 3]) -- Prints "3" print(ExampleTable 4]) -- Prints "8" A table can be an array of objects. function Point(x, y) -- "Point" object constructor return -- Creates and returns a new object (table) end array = -- Creates array of points -- array = ; print(array y) -- Prints 40 Using a hash map to emulate an array is normally slower than using an actual array; however, Lua tables are optimized for use as arrays to help avoid this issue.


Metatables

Extensible semantics is a key feature of Lua, and the metatable concept allows powerful customization of tables. The following example demonstrates an "infinite" table. For any n, fibs /code> will give the n-th Fibonacci number using dynamic programming and
memoization In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again. Memoization ...
. fibs = -- Initial values for fibs and fibs setmetatable(fibs, )


Object-oriented programming

Although Lua does not have a built-in concept of classes,
object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...
can be emulated using functions and tables. An object is formed by putting methods and fields in a table. Inheritance (both single and multiple) can be implemented with metatables, delegating nonexistent methods and fields to a parent object. There is no such concept as "class" with these techniques; rather, prototypes are used, similar to Self or
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
. New objects are created either with a factory method (that constructs new objects from scratch) or by cloning an existing object. Creating a basic vector object: local Vector = local VectorMeta = function Vector.new(x, y, z) -- The constructor return setmetatable(, VectorMeta) end function Vector.magnitude(self) -- Another method return math.sqrt(self.x^2 + self.y^2 + self.z^2) end local vec = Vector.new(0, 1, 0) -- Create a vector print(vec.magnitude(vec)) -- Call a method (output: 1) print(vec.x) -- Access a member variable (output: 0) Here, tells Lua to look for an element in the table if it is not present in the table. , which is equivalent to , first looks in the table for the element. The table does not have a element, but its metatable delegates to the table for the element when it's not found in the table. Lua provides some syntactic sugar to facilitate object orientation. To declare member functions inside a prototype table, one can use , which is equivalent to . Calling class methods also makes use of the colon: is equivalent to . That in mind, here is a corresponding class with syntactic sugar: local Vector = Vector.__index = Vector function Vector:new(x, y, z) -- The constructor -- Since the function definition uses a colon, -- its first argument is "self" which refers -- to "Vector" return setmetatable(, self) end function Vector:magnitude() -- Another method -- Reference the implicit object using self return math.sqrt(self.x^2 + self.y^2 + self.z^2) end local vec = Vector:new(0, 1, 0) -- Create a vector print(vec:magnitude()) -- Call a method (output: 1) print(vec.x) -- Access a member variable (output: 0)


Inheritance

Lua supports using metatables to give Lua class inheritance. In this example, we allow vectors to have their values multiplied by a constant in a derived class. local Vector = Vector.__index = Vector function Vector:new(x, y, z) -- The constructor -- Here, self refers to whatever class's "new" -- method we call. In a derived class, self will -- be the derived class; in the Vector class, self -- will be Vector return setmetatable(, self) end function Vector:magnitude() -- Another method -- Reference the implicit object using self return math.sqrt(self.x^2 + self.y^2 + self.z^2) end -- Example of class inheritance local VectorMult = VectorMult.__index = VectorMult setmetatable(VectorMult, Vector) -- Make VectorMult a child of Vector function VectorMult:multiply(value) self.x = self.x * value self.y = self.y * value self.z = self.z * value return self end local vec = VectorMult:new(0, 1, 0) -- Create a vector print(vec:magnitude()) -- Call a method (output: 1) print(vec.y) -- Access a member variable (output: 1) vec:multiply(2) -- Multiply all components of vector by 2 print(vec.y) -- Access member again (output: 2) Lua also supports multiple inheritance; can either be a function or a table. Operator overloading can also be done; Lua metatables can have elements such as , , and so on.


Implementation

Lua programs are not interpreted directly from the textual Lua file, but are compiled into bytecode, which is then run on the Lua
virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...
. The compilation process is typically invisible to the user and is performed during run-time, especially when a JIT compiler is used, but it can be done offline in order to increase loading performance or reduce the memory footprint of the host environment by leaving out the compiler. Lua bytecode can also be produced and executed from within Lua, using the dump function from the string library and the load/loadstring/loadfile functions. Lua version 5.3.4 is implemented in approximately 24,000 lines of C code. Like most CPUs, and unlike most virtual machines (which are
stack-based Stack-oriented programming, is a programming paradigm which relies on a stack machine model for passing parameters. Stack-oriented languages operate on one or more stacks, each of which may serve a different purpose. Programming constructs i ...
), the Lua VM is register-based, and therefore more closely resembles an actual hardware design. The register architecture both avoids excessive copying of values and reduces the total number of instructions per function. The virtual machine of Lua 5 is one of the first register-based pure VMs to have a wide use. Parrot and
Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...
's Dalvik are two other well-known register-based VMs. PCScheme's VM was also register-based. This example is the bytecode listing of the factorial function defined above (as shown by the luac 5.1 compiler): function (9 instructions, 36 bytes at 0x8063c60) 1 param, 6 slots, 0 upvalues, 6 locals, 2 constants, 0 functions 1 LOADK 1 -1 ; 1 2 LOADK 2 -2 ; 2 3 MOVE 3 0 4 LOADK 4 -1 ; 1 5 FORPREP 2 1 ; to 7 6 MUL 1 1 5 7 FORLOOP 2 -2 ; to 6 8 RETURN 1 2 9 RETURN 0 1


C API

Lua is intended to be embedded into other applications, and provides a C API for this purpose. The API is divided into two parts: the Lua core and the Lua auxiliary library. The Lua API's design eliminates the need for manual
reference management Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations (references) as well as managing project references ...
in C code, unlike Python's API. The API, like the language, is minimalistic. Advanced functionality is provided by the auxiliary library, which consists largely of preprocessor macros which assist with complex table operations. The Lua C API is
stack Stack may refer to: Places * Stack Island, an island game reserve in Bass Strait, south-eastern Australia, in Tasmania’s Hunter Island Group * Blue Stack Mountains, in Co. Donegal, Ireland People * Stack (surname) (including a list of people ...
based. Lua provides functions to push and pop most simple C data types (integers, floats, etc.) to and from the stack, as well as functions for manipulating tables through the stack. The Lua stack is somewhat different from a traditional stack; the stack can be indexed directly, for example. Negative indices indicate offsets from the top of the stack. For example, −1 is the top (most recently pushed value), while positive indices indicate offsets from the bottom (oldest value). Marshalling data between C and Lua functions is also done using the stack. To call a Lua function, arguments are pushed onto the stack, and then the lua_call is used to call the actual function. When writing a C function to be directly called from Lua, the arguments are read from the stack. Here is an example of calling a Lua function from C: #include #include // Lua main library (lua_*) #include // Lua auxiliary library (luaL_*) int main(void) Running this example gives:
$ cc -o example example.c -llua
$ ./example
Result: 8
The C API also provides some special tables, located at various "pseudo-indices" in the Lua stack. At LUA_GLOBALSINDEX prior to Lua 5.2 is the globals table, _G from within Lua, which is the main namespace. There is also a registry located at LUA_REGISTRYINDEX where C programs can store Lua values for later retrieval.


Modules

Besides standard library (core) modules it is possible to write extensions using the Lua API. Extension modules are shared objects which can be used to extend the functionality of the interpreter by providing native facilities to Lua scripts. Lua scripts may load extension modules using require, just like modules written in Lua itself, or with package.loadlib. When a C library is loaded via require("foo") Lua will look for the function luaopen_foo and call it, which acts as any C function callable from Lua and generally returns a table filled with methods . A growing collection of modules known as ''rocks'' are available through a package management system called LuaRocks, in the spirit of CPAN, RubyGems and
Python eggs setuptools is a package development process library designed to facilitate packaging Python projects by enhancing the Python standard library (distribution utilities). It includes: *Python package and module definitions *Distribution package met ...
. Prewritten Lua bindings exist for most popular programming languages, including other scripting languages. For C++, there are a number of template-based approaches and some automatic binding generators.


Applications

In video game development, Lua is widely used as a
scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripti ...
by programmers, mainly due to its perceived easiness to embed, fast execution, and short learning curve. Notable games which use Lua include '' Roblox'', '' Garry's Mod'', '' World of Warcraft'', '' Payday 2'', '' Phantasy Star Online 2'', '' Dota 2'', ''
Angry Birds Space ''Angry Birds Space'' is a physics-based puzzle game and the fifth game in the ''Angry Birds'' video game series. It is developed and published by Rovio Entertainment. Angry Birds Space was released on March 22, 2012. The game was featured in NASA ...
'', '' Crysis'', and many others. Some games that do not natively support Lua programming or scripting, have this functionality added by mods, such as ComputerCraft does for '' Minecraft''. In addition, Lua is also used in non-video game software, such as Adobe Lightroom, Moho, iClone, Aerospike and certain system software in FreeBSD and NetBSD, and is used as a template scripting language on
MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...
using the Scribunto extension. In 2003, a poll conducted by GameDev.net showed Lua was the most popular scripting language for game programming. On 12 January 2012, Lua was announced as a winner of the Front Line Award 2011 from the magazine '' Game Developer'' in the category Programming Tools. A large number of non-game applications also use Lua for extensibility, such as LuaTeX, an implementation of the TeX type-setting language, Redis, a key-value database,
Neovim Vim (;
"Vim is pronounced as one word, like Jim, not vi-ai-em. It's written with a capital, since it's a name, again like Jim."
, a text editor, Nginx, a web server, and Wireshark, a network packet analyzer. Through the Scribunto extension, Lua is available as a server-side scripting language in the
MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...
software that powers
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...
and other wikis. Among its uses are allowing the integration of data from Wikidata into articles, and powering the .


Derived languages


Languages that compile to Lua

* MoonScript is a dynamic,
whitespace White space or whitespace may refer to: Technology * Whitespace characters, characters in computing that represent horizontal or vertical space * White spaces (radio), allocated but locally unused radio frequencies * TV White Space Database, a mec ...
-sensitive
scripting language A scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripti ...
inspired by CoffeeScript, which is compiled into Lua. This means that instead of using do and end (or ) to delimit sections of code it uses line breaks and indentation style. A notable usage of MoonScript is the video game distribution website
Itch.io Itch.io (stylized as itch.io) is a website for users to host, sell and download indie games. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 500,000 games and items (assets, ebooks, music) . Itch.io also allows users to host ...
. * Haxe supports compilation to a Lua target, supporting Lua 5.1-5.3 as well as LuaJIT 2.0 and 2.1. * Fennel, a Lisp dialect that targets Lua. * Urn, a
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...
dialect that is built on Lua. * Amulet, an ML-like functional language, whose compiler outputs Lua files.


Dialects

* LuaJIT * Luau from Roblox, Lua 5.1 language with gradual typing and ergonomic additions. * Ravi, JIT-enabled Lua 5.3 language with optional static typing. JIT is guided by type information. * Shine, a fork of LuaJIT with many extensions, including a module system and a macro system. In addition, the Lua users community provides some ''power patches'' on top of the reference C implementation.


See also

* Comparison of programming languages


References


Further reading

* (The 1st ed. is availabl
online
) * * * * * Chapters 6 and 7 are dedicated to Lua, while others look at software in Brazil more broadly. * * * * * * Interview with Roberto Ierusalimschy. * How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design. *


External links

*
Lua Users
Community
Lua Forum

LuaDist

Lua Rocks - Package manager

Projects in Lua
{{Portal bar, Free and open-source software, Computer programming Articles with example C code Brazilian inventions Cross-platform free software Cross-platform software Dynamic programming languages Dynamically typed programming languages Embedded systems Free compilers and interpreters Free computer libraries Free software programmed in C Object-oriented programming languages Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro Programming languages Programming languages created in 1993 Prototype-based programming languages Register-based virtual machines Scripting languages Software using the MIT license