Introduction to Lua

Slide 1

What Is Lua?

• Embeddable Scripting Language with full class support
• Developed Brasil 1993 for PETROBRAS (Brazilian national iol company) as a data description language
• Used extensively in game development (Dr. Dobbs Journal, 1996). Wikipedia lists 20+ games which use it
  • Grim Fandango
  • World of Warcraft client
  • Warhammer client
• I've coded 500 or so lines in it, so I'm an Expert.

Slide 2

Hello World and other matters

Slide 3

The Basis of the Language: the Table

foo={}

• A "dictionary" in python and most other languages
• Anything can be a key or a value
• Lots of syntactic sugar for the simplest cases
• foo[17]="seventeen"
• foo["seventeen"]=17
• print(foo.seventeen) 17