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Lua—An Extensible Extension Language

1996; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/(sici)1097-024x(199606)26

1097-024X

Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes Filho,

Logic, programming, and type systems

This paper describes Lua, a language for extending applications. Lua combines procedural features with powerful data description facilities, by using a simple, yet powerful, mechanism of tables . This mechanism implements the concepts of records, arrays and recursive data types (pointers), and adds some object-oriented facilities, such as methods with dynamic dispatching. Lua presents a mechanism of fallbacks that allows programmers to extend the semantics of the language in some unconventional ways. As a noteworthy example, fallbacks allow the user to add different kinds of inheritance to the language. Currently, Lua is being extensively used in production for several tasks, including user configuration, general-purpose data-entry, description of user interfaces, storage of structured graphical metafiles, and generic attribute configuration for finite element meshes.