37790aab57
lua ia a powerful, light-weight programming language. Submitted by: David Terrell <dbt@meat.net>
40 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
40 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for
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extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose,
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stand-alone language.
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Lua combines simple procedural syntax (similar to Pascal) with
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powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays
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and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, interpreted
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from bytecodes, and has automatic memory management with garbage
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collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid
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prototyping.
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A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms
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for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features
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directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure
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object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for
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implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring
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an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing
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the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways. Extensible
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semantics is a distinguishing feature of Lua.
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Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application.
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This means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that
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allows the application to exchange data with Lua programs and also
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to extend Lua with C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded
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as a language framework for building domain-specific languages.
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Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in
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ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The
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implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and
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low embedding cost. The result is a fast language engine with small
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footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems too.
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Lua was designed and implemented at TeCGraf, the Computer Graphics
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Technology Group of PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of
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Rio de Janeiro in Brazil). TeCGraf is a laboratory of the Department
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of Computer Science. The authors can be contacted by email at
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lua@tecgraf.puc-rio.br.
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WWW: ${HOMEPAGE}
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