March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
18h 40m
English
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Chapter 7. Lua
The Power of Scripting
How do you define Lua?
Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo: An embeddable, lightweight, fast, powerful scripting language.
Roberto Ierusalimschy: Unfortunately, more and more people use “scripting language” as a synonym for “dynamic language.” Nowadays even Erlang or Scheme are called scripting languages. That is sad, because we lose the precision to describe a particular class of dynamic languages. Lua is a scripting language in the original meaning of the expression. A language to control other components, usually written in another language.
What should people keep in mind when designing software with Lua?
Luiz: That there probably is a Lua way of doing things. It’s not recommended to try to emulate all practices from other languages. You have to really use the features of your language, although I guess that is true for any language. In the case of Lua, those features ...
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