Lua
From Wikiversity
See discussion tab for more info.
|
[edit] History
Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Versions of Lua prior to version 5.0 were released under a license similar to the BSD license. From version 5.0 onwards, Lua has been licensed under the MIT License.
Some of its closest relatives include Icon for its design and Python for its ease of use by non-programmers. 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) were a major influence on their decision to develop the table as the primary data structure of Lua.
Lua has been used in many commercial applications, such as Far Cry, Garry's Mod, Supreme Commander, World of Warcraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, as well as non-commercial applications, such as Multi Theft Auto and Angband and its variants.
[edit] Introduction
Lua is a lightweight, reflective, imperative and procedural language, designed as a scripting language with extensible semantics as a primary goal. It is therefore an excellent language for extending existing applications, and is usually embedded in another application. It is coded in ANSI C, and can thus be compiled on a vast amount of different platforms. Lua scripts are usually compiled just before execution, but a compiler exists. Compiled scripts offer a small speed bonus as there is no need to compile the script at runtime.
[edit] Prerequisites
The Lua interpreter, which can be downloaded from the official Lua website. The package includes the Lua compiler and a few sample scripts.
