1. What is Lua?
Brandon Burgess
Csc 415

2. Conception Lua was created and is maintained in Brazil
Created by a small committee at PUC-Rio’s TecGraf
The brainchild of three men’s experience with creating languages
In 1993 DEL and Sol were combined to create Lua

3. Early Years
Version 1 - Graphic Metafiles, just-in-time compiler, compiler speed (1994)
Version 2 - Extensible extensive language(fall backs) (1995)
International Exposure and V3 – Games and Tags ( )
Version 4 – API change (state issues) and For Loops (2000)

4. Names, Bindings, and Scopes
Keywords (false, nil, return)
Lua C API, Basic Lua Api (Lua.h), Auxilary library (lauxlib.h)
Global or Local
local x = 5
local function f()
print (x)
end
f() Prints 5
x = 6
f() Prints 6

5. Data Types Dynamically Typed
Boolean, Number, String, Nil, Function, Userdata, Thread, and Table.
Can call functions based in C
Objects (table, function, thread, and userdata)

6. Assignments Blocks and Chunks
Comma Separated Assignments( a, b = 10, 2*x)
Discarding Excess, Filling with Nil.
A=6
A, B = A+2, A  B still equals 6 before A changes to 8

7. Control Structures While  while exp do block end
Repeat  repeat block until exp
If  if exp then block {else if} [else] end
Numeric For  for name = exp , exp [, exp] do block end
Generic For  for namelist in explist do block end

8. Expressions Supported Operators And and OR ( 10 or 20) vs (10 and 20)
Table Constructors a = { [f(1)] = g, “x”, “y”, [20] = 5 }

9. Object Oriented Tables are All Unique Inheritance (_index)
Tablesception
Function Table:new (o)
O = O or { }
setmetatable(o, self)
Self._index = self
Return O
End
A = Table:new

10. Concurrency
Coroutines
Create
Execute
Yield
Resume

11. Garbage Collection
Mark and Sweep