Lua Fundamentals

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

• The building blocks of OOP in Lua
• Examples

• Weak tables
• Finalizers
• Compilation, eval, loading