Use a live demo to play with Lua if you don't want to install anything on your computer. To run Lua programs on your computer, you'll need a standalone Lua interpreter and perhaps some …

Nevertheless, Lua is still the same language; most things that we will see here are valid regardless of how you are using Lua. For a start, we recommend that you use the stand-alone …

if line > MAXLINES then showpage() line = 0 end When you write nested if s, you can use elseif. It is similar to an else followed by an if, but it avoids the need for multiple end s: if op == "+" then …

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 …

We use tables to represent ordinary arrays, symbol tables, sets, records, queues, and other data structures, in a simple, uniform, and efficient way. Lua uses tables to represent packages as well.

Lua is implemented as a library, written in clean C, the common subset of Standard C and C++. The Lua distribution includes a host program called lua, which uses the Lua library to offer a …

Although we refer to Lua as an interpreted language, Lua always precompiles source code to an intermediate form before running it. (This is not a big deal: Most interpreted languages do the …

The stand-alone interpreter (also called lua.c due to its source file, or simply lua due to its executable) is a small program that allows the direct use of Lua.

You can help to support the Lua project by buying a book published by Lua.org and by making a donation. You can also help to spread the word about Lua by buying Lua products at Zazzle.

Two functions, time and date, do all date and time queries in Lua. The time function, when called without arguments, returns the current date and time, coded as a number.