To embed Lua into your C or C++ program, you'll need the Lua headers to compile your program and a Lua library to link with it. If you're getting a ready-made Lua package for your platform, …

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.

As soon as you enter this line, Lua runs it and starts a new chunk in the next line. By then, the local declaration is already out of scope. To run such examples in interactive mode, you …

Lua is eight-bit clean and so strings may contain characters with any numeric value, including embedded zeros. That means that you can store any binary data into a string.

Lua does not have the concept of class; each object defines its own behavior and has a shape of its own. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to emulate classes in Lua, following the lead from …

You should avoid identifiers starting with an underscore followed by one or more uppercase letters (e.g., _VERSION); they are reserved for special uses in Lua. Usually, I reserve the identifier _ …

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].

However, it is customary in Lua to start arrays with index 1. The Lua libraries adhere to this convention; so, if your arrays also start with 1, you will be able to use their functions directly.

A table in Lua is an object in more than one sense. Like objects, tables have a state. Like objects, tables have an identity (a selfness) that is independent of their values; specifically, two objects …

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. …