Last updated
Last updated
Lua is commonly described as a "" language, providing a small set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types. Lua does not contain explicit support for , but allows it to be implemented with . Similarly, Lua allows programmers to implement , , and other related features using its single table implementation; allow the employment of many techniques from ; and full lexical allows fine-grained to enforce the .
In general, Lua strives to provide simple, flexible that can be extended as needed, rather than supply a feature-set specific to one programming paradigm. As a result, the base language is —the full reference is only about 247 compiled—and easily adaptable to a broad range of applications.
Lua is a language intended for use as an or and is compact enough to fit on a variety of host platforms. It supports only a small number of atomic data structures such as values, numbers (double-precision and 64-bit by default), and . Typical data structures such as , , , and can be represented using Lua's single native data structure, the table, which is essentially a heterogeneous .
Lua implements a small set of advanced features such as , , , proper , (automatic conversion between string and number values at run time), (cooperative multitasking) and .