Lua Quick Start Guide

for loop

Lua has two flavors of the for loop, the numeric for and a generic for. The generic for is used to iterate over collections and will be covered in Chapter 3, Tables and Objects. For now, let's focus on the numeric for loop.

Syntactically, a numeric for loop consists of the for keyword, three expressions, and a do/end chunk. The three expressions are the initial expression, final expression, and step expression. Each expression is separated by a comma. The format for the loop looks like this:

for variable = initial_exp, final_exp, step_exp do  -- Chunkend

The result of the intial expression should be numeric; it will be assigned to a variable local to the for loop. The loop will increment or decrement this variable so long as it is ...