Comprehensive Lua

Introduction to Lua

• A bit of history
• Lua's goals, features and non-goals
• Resources of Lua documentation and tutorials
• Installing the Lua interpreter
• Setting up and using LuaRocks

• Identifiers
• Comments, block comments
• Global variables and enforcing of strictness
• Local variables
• Standalone programs, program arguments
• Compilation units, chunks, expressions, semicolons

• Basic types: nil, boolean, number, string
• Object types: function, userdata, thread, table
• References/objects vs. basic values
• The importance of tables in Lua

• Tables as an associative array
• Tables as numeric arrays, sequences

• The if then elseif else end
• The while loop
• The repeat loop
• The simple for loop

• Return values vs exceptions
• Converting a return value to an exception
• Converting an exception to a return value
• Error levels

• Polynomial evaluation
• Breadth first search
• Additional exercises

• Named arguments
• Object-oriented calls
• Closures
• Currying
• Tail calls
• Multiple assignment and return
• Varargs

• The generic for loop
• Stateless vs stateful iterators
• Differences between iterators and co-routines

• The set example
• The __tostring metamethod
• Arithmetic metamethods
• The __index, __newindex metamethods
• The __len metamethod

• Using modules
• Creating modules
• Organizing modules into packages

• Tables for queues and stacks
• Tables describing graphs
• Matrices as tables
• Linked lists as tables
• String buffers

• Proxies
• Readonly
• Memoization
• Dynamic programming with memoization
• The Fibonacci example

• Relationship between global variables and environments
• Free variables
• The _ENV table and the _G table

• Different approaches to creating modules
• Modules that change the behavior
• Module initialization and arguments
• Using environments to implement safe modules

• Producer, consumer, filter
• Wrapping co-routines to get iterators
• Stateless iterator for linked lists

• Uploading packages to MoonRocks

• The map function
• The reduce / fold function

• Different approaches to OOP
• Different approaches to inheritance
• Examples

• Compilation
• Eval
• Relationship with the environment
• Binary chunks

• Weak tables
• Finalizers, the __gc meta-method

• Generating bytecode from source code
• Reading and analyzing bytecode
• Quick tour of the source code of the Lua VM

• Calling C from Lua
• Search path and loading of C modules

• The Stack
• Error handling
• Continuations

• Arrays
• Strings
• Userdata
• Metatables
• Object oriented calls
• Light userdata

• Allocators
• GC API

• Co-routines vs threads
• Real multi-threading and Lua states