Lua

Lua

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua is designed to be a general-purpose language, but it is particularly popular in the video game industry for scripting game logic.

History

Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The language was developed to address the need for a scripting language that could be embedded into applications, particularly for data entry and configuration.

Features

Lua is known for its simplicity and flexibility. Some of its key features include:

• Lightweight: Lua is designed to have a small footprint, making it ideal for embedding in applications.
• Extensible: Lua can be extended with libraries written in C or other languages.
• Embeddable: Lua is often embedded in applications to provide scripting capabilities.
• Garbage Collection: Lua has automatic memory management with garbage collection.
• Coroutines: Lua supports coroutines, allowing for cooperative multitasking.

Syntax

Lua's syntax is simple and easy to learn. It uses a minimalistic approach, with a small set of keywords and constructs. Here is an example of a simple Lua script:

```lua -- This is a comment in Lua

function factorial(n)

 if n == 0 then
   return 1
 else
   return n * factorial(n - 1)
 end

end

print(factorial(5)) -- Output: 120 ```

Applications

Lua is widely used in various domains, including:

• Game Development: Lua is used in popular game engines like Corona SDK, CryEngine, and World of Warcraft for scripting game logic.
• Web Development: Lua can be used in web development frameworks such as Lapis and Sailor.
• Embedded Systems: Lua is used in embedded systems due to its small footprint and efficiency.

Also see

• Programming language
• Scripting language
• Game engine
• Garbage collection (computer science)

External Links

• [Lua Official Website](https://www.lua.org/)
• [Lua Users Wiki](http://lua-users.org/)