Short:        Lua powerful embeddable programming language
Author:       Lua Team
Uploader:     djbase gmx de (Matthias Muench)
Type:         dev/lang
Version:      5.0.2
Architecture: ppc-morphos

DESCRIPTION
===========
This is a port of the Lua programming language for MorphOS.


ABOUT LUA
=========
For more information about Lua see http://www.lua.org/

Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending
applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone
language. Lua is free software.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description
constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is
dynamically typed, interpreted from bytecodes, and has automatic memory
management with garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration,
scripting, and rapid prototyping.

A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms
for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly
in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented
language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and
inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep
the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in
unconventional ways. Extensible semantics is a distinguishing feature
of Lua.

Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application. This
means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that allows the
application to exchange data with Lua programs and also to extend Lua with
C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded as a language framework for
building domain-specific languages.

Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C,
and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals
are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. The result
is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in
embedded systems too.

Lua is designed and implemented by a team at Tecgraf, the Computer
Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University
of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil). Tecgraf is a laboratory of the Department
of Computer Science.


INSTALLATION
============
GNU make targets include:
 all     - make all targets
 install - install into SDK
 clean   - clean up files
 test    - run hello world test
 echo    - display current parameters

You'll find more useful examples and a corresponding makefile
in the etc directory.


BUGS
====
test/factorial.lua has a strange result for 16! which I have
yet to find an explanation for.

The rest of the tests and examples run without problems.


TO DO
=====
- add dlfcn support
- add readline support
- shared library version