Lua

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Lua

Paradigm(s)	prototype-based
Designed by	Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
Appeared in	1993
Computational class	Turing complete
Reference implementation	PUC-Rio Lua (GitHub mirror)
Major implementations	LuaJIT
Influenced by	Awk, C++, CLU, DEL, Modula-2, Python, SNOBOL, SOL, Tcl
Influenced	Luau
File extension(s)	.lua

Lua is a programming language designed in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo of PUC-Rio, and implemented by Ierusalimschy in 1993, to be a simple, embeddable, and extensible language that met the growing demands of Tecgraf during an era of Brazilian protectionism which prevented their clients from importing foreign software.

Self-interpreter

Lua supports running arbitrary Lua code through the loadstring (4.0-5.2) or load (5.3+) function, which returns a function or nil if the code is not valid.

local load = loadstring or load
local func = load([[
  -- Code goes here
]])
func()

One can pass input from the standard input stream into the function with io.read() as well.

local load = loadstring or load
local func = load(io.read())
assert(func, "Code is not valid.")
func()

See also

• Python, another prototype-based language from the same time period
• wikipedia:Lua