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