Programming in Lua

Programming in Lua - Currently, many programming languages are concerned with how to help you write programs with hundreds of thousands of lines. For that, they offer you packages, namespaces, complex type systems, a myriad of constructions, and thousands of documentation pages to be studied. Lua does not try to help you write programs with hundreds of thousands of lines. Instead, Lua tries to help you solve your problem with only hundreds of lines, or even less. To achieve this aim, Lua relies on extensibility, like many other languages. Unlike most other languages, however, Lua is easily extended not only with software written in Lua itself, but also with software written in other languages, such as C and C++. Lua was designed, from the beginning, to be integrated with software written in C and other conventional languages. This duality of languages brings many benefits. Lua is a tiny and simple language, partly because it does not try to do what C is already good for, such as sheer performance, low-level operations, or interface with third-party software. Lua relies on C for those tasks. What Lua does offer is what C is not good for: a good distance from the hardware, dynamic structures, no redundancies, ease of testing and debugging. For that, Lua has a safe environment, automatic memory management, and great facility to handle strings and other kinds of data with dynamic size.