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Lua 5.3 Reference Manual

by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes

1 – Introduction

Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general procedural programming with data description facilities. Lua also offers good support for object-oriented programming, functional programming, and data-driven programming. Lua is intended to be used as a powerful, lightweight, embeddable scripting language for any program that needs one. Lua is implemented as a library, written in clean C, the common subset of Standard C and C++.

As an extension language, Lua has no notion of a "main" program: it only works embedded in a host client, called the embedding program or simply the host. The host program can invoke functions to execute a piece of Lua code, can write and read Lua variables, and can register C functions to be called by Lua code. Through the use of C