The official definition of the Lua language is its reference manual, which describes the syntax and the semantics of Lua, the standard libraries, and the C API.

Lua is a powerful and fast programming language that is easy to learn and use and to embed into your application. Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language.

Lua 5.3 Reference Manual The reference manual is the official definition of the Lua language. For a complete introduction to Lua programming, see the book Programming in Lua.

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports several programming styles: procedural, object-oriented, functional, data-driven, and data description.

Dec 22, 2025 · The official definition of the Lua language is its reference manual, which describes the syntax and the semantics of Lua, the standard libraries, and the C API.

If you are using the stand-alone Lua interpreter, all you have to do to run your first program is to call the interpreter (usually named lua) with the name of the text file that contains your program.

Lua compares strings in alphabetical order, which follows the locale set for Lua. For instance, with the European Latin-1 locale, we have "acai" < "açaí" < "acorde".

For Lua, the two forms are equivalent and can be intermixed freely; but for a human reader, each form may signal a different intention. A common mistake for beginners is to confuse a.x with a[x].

Lua is free software, and is provided as usual with no guarantees, as stated in its license. The implementation described in this manual is available at Lua's official web site, www.lua.org. Like any …

Mar 30, 2015 · Abstract. Since its inception, in 1993, the Lua programming language has gone far beyond our most optimistic expectations. In this paper, we describe the trajectory of Lua, from its …