Talk:Lua

Why is it here at all? Is Lua esoteric? If the concept of tables and metatables can be considered an "esoteric" feature of the language, then it should be at least mentioned (if not explained in detail). --Blashyrkh (talk) 09:35, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

We have references to non esoteric languages on here, if it needs to be referenced for whatever reason --Yayimhere2(school) (talk) 10:14, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

We could reference external resources like Wikipedia for that reason. --Blashyrkh (talk) 10:24, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. However, at the same time, we can find ways to be light-hearted and talk about the weird parts of the language; see Python for an example. Corbin (talk) 19:07, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

not sure if this is fit for inclusion, but Lua's pattern matching allows for handling nested brackets via %bxy, e.g ("abc (def (ghi) jkl) mno"):match("%b()") returns (def (ghi) jkl), something regular Regex can't do. off the top of my head I can't really name any other "esoteric" features other than, well, tables in their entirety —aadenboy (talk|contribs) 19:17, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

IMHO, an amazing (unique? esoteric? idk) feature of Lua is that OOP can be constructed almost without syntactic support from the language itself (except : operator and self keyword), while keeping amount of boilerplate code at minimum level. Compare it with C. Can one implement OOP in C? Sure! just look at the Linux kernel or gtk. But OOP in C requires a lot of boilerplate code. Compare with C++ now. C++ is OOP naturally. But it's done at the cost of syntactic extension of C. Lua proudly sits on both chairs. --Blashyrkh (talk) 19:33, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

multiple expressions and results. functions can return more than one value, multiple variables can be initialized in one line, etc. rules for how they are handled are also defined in the manual. here's for v5.4. one 'esoteric' rule for multiple results is that they are only expanded iff it is the last exp and it's not wrapped in parentheses, else it is eq to the first value. so, given f() returns 2 and 3: x, y, z = 1, f() is eq to x = 1; y = 2; z = 3, but x, y, z = f(), 4 is eq to x = 2; y = 4; z = nil -- somefan (talk | contribs) 20:57, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Tuple assignment is not unique feature, Python has the same since the Beginning of Time. Special case of tuple expansion/truncation may be considered a syntactic sugar. --Blashyrkh (talk) 21:06, 20 July 2026 (UTC)