Lua简介 - 5IVI4I_I_60Y - 网易博客

Lua简介

Lua(http://www.lua.org) 是一种强大的脚本语言，非常容易与现有程序进行集成。与JavaScript或者VBScript相比，它不需要一些自动化的接口，只需要定义一些接口API即可。非常适合我这种对COM和自动化都一知半解的人。下面是来自Lua网站的介绍。

Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua isfree software.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based onassociative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways. Extensible semantics is a distinguishing feature of Lua.

Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application. This means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that allows the application to exchange data with Lua programs and also to extend Lua with C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded as a language framework for building domain-specific languages.

Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. The result is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems too.

Lua is designed and implemented by ateam atPUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro inBrazil. Lua was born and raised atTecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is now housed at Lua.org. Both Tecgraf and Lua.org are laboratories of theDepartment of Computer Science.

'Lua' means 'moon' in Portuguese and is pronounced LOO-ah.