About Lua

Lua is powerful, lightweight interpreted scripting language with a small footprint. It supports multi-paradigm programming: procedural, object-oriented, functional, data-driven and data-description. Lua is rarely used as a stand-alone language. Instead Lua focuses on scripting, as “secondary” language which integrated into other software written in mainly C/C++.

Some examples of Lua’s usage areas: network software, video games, user graphical interfaces, graphics/text processing software, etc. Lua also is good for beginners to create simple video games.

Lua interpreter is written in ANSI C and it is extremely small, both interpreter and source code is only about 1Mb. Lua is considered one of the fastest interpreted languages.

Checking Lua

Some distributions already have Lua pre-installed. Open your terminal and type:

lua

If the output is be something like:

Lua 5.4.3  Copyright (C) 1994-2021 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
>

Congratulations! Lua is already installed on your system and ready to use.

Hint! To exit Lua’s interpreter press Ctrl + D.

Lua installation

If you see the message:

bash: lua: command not found

It means that Lua is not installed yet. The simplest way to install Lua from package manager dnf, which comes with Fedora. In your terminal type command:

$ sudo dnf install lua

Congratulations! Lua interpreter is installed!

Lua syntax

Lua’s syntax is very similar to languages Python, Ruby and C. For details check official Lua manual.

Learning Lua

Lua is very fun and simple to learn, but hard to master. Here is an example of classical hello world program:

print("Hello, world!")

Example of the program to calculate factorial, from the book Programming in Lua.

function fact (n)
  if n == 0 then
    return 1
  else
    return n * fact(n-1)
  end
end

print("enter a number:")
a = io.read("*n") -- read a number
print(fact(a))

Authors: Dmitri Smirnov