Programming in Lua : p1.3

A Few Typographical Conventions

The book encloses "literal strings" between double quotes and single characters, like `a´, between single quotes. Strings that are used as patterns are also enclosed between single quotes, like '[%w_]*'. The book uses a courier font both for little chunks of code and for identifiers. Larger chunks of code are shown in display style:

    -- program "Hello World"
    print("Hello World")         --> Hello World

The notation --> shows the output of a statement or, occasionally, the result of an expression:

    print(10)     --> 10
    13 + 3        --> 16

Because a double hyphen (--) starts a comment in Lua, there is no problem if you include those annotations in your programs. Finally, the book uses the notation <--> to indicate that something is equivalent to something else:

    this     <-->     that

That is, there is no difference to Lua whether you write this or that.