Next: 2 Environment and Chunks Up: Reference Manual of the Previous: Reference Manual of the

1 Introduction

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.

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.tar.gz
or by WWW (World Wide Web) from
   http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lua.html


Next: 2 Environment and Chunks Up: Reference Manual of the Previous: Reference Manual of the