Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general procedural programming features with data description facilities. It is supposed to be used as a configuration language for any program that needs one. Its main extensions are related to object-oriented facilities, and fallbacks, but it has some other minor contributions. Lua has been designed and implemented by W. Celes F., L. H. de Figueiredo and R. Ierusalimschy.
Lua is implemented as a library, written in C. Being an extension language, Lua has no notion of a ``main'' program: it only works embedded in a host client, called the embedding program. This host program can invoke functions to execute a piece of code in Lua, can write and read Lua variables, and can register C functions to be called by Lua code. Through the use of C functions, Lua can be augmented to cope with rather different domains, thus creating customized programming languages sharing a syntactical framework.
Lua is free distribution software,
and provided as usual with no guarantees.
The implementation described in this manual is available
by anonymous ftp from
ftp.icad.puc-rio.br:/pub/lua/lua-2.1.tar.gz
or by WWW (World Wide Web) from
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lua.html
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