Lua

Lua is an extensible, light-weight programming language written in C.

It was designed from the beginning to be a software that can be integrated with the code written in C and other conventional languages. This integration brings many benefits. It does not try to do what C can already do but aims at offering what C is not good at: a good distance from the hardware, dynamic structures, no redundancies, ease of testing and debugging. For this, Lua has a safe environment, automatic memory management, and good facilities for handling strings and other kinds of data with dynamic size.

Features:

• Extensible
• Simple
• Efficient
• Portable
• Free and open

Environment

When we extend Lua to other languages/applications, we need a Software Development Kit with a compiler that is compatible with the Lua Application Program Interface.

• Installation on Linux

# the latest version
$ wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.3.tar.gz
$ tar zxf lua-5.3.3.tar.gz
$ cd lua-5.3.3
$ make linux test

touch helloworld.lua

vi helloworld.lua

#!/usr/local/bin/lua
print("Hello World!")

chmod +x helloworld.lua

$ lua helloWorld

Parts

• Data Types

• Variables

• Operators

• Loops

• Decision Making

• Functions

• Strings

• Arrays

• Iterators

• Tables

• Modules

• Metatables

• Coroutines

• File I/O