Short: powerful embeddable programming language Author: Lua Team Uploader: ssolie telus net (Steven Solie) Type: dev/lang Version: 5.1-2 Architecture: ppc-amigaos SUMMARY ======= This is a port of the Lua programming language for AmigaOS 4.0. Now includes dynamic library support which opens up all sorts of possibilites for easily extending Lua with AmigaOS functionality. See the amiga directory for more information. An example amigalua.library is provided to give a small sample of what is possible without having to recompile Lua itself. 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. CONFIGURATION ============= Everything builds with gmake now. By default the clib2-ts flavour is built with dynamic library support. Edit the src/luaconf.h file and Makefiles to customize Lua to your particular project. Some projects may not require dynamic library loading and could just use simply clib2 or newlib for example. INSTALLATION ============ Installation into your SDK varies depending on what flavour of Lua you want to use for your project. Here is what to do to install the standard Lua (clib2-ts with dynamic library support) into your SDK: Copy src/lua and src/luac binaries to SDK:Local/C Copy src/liblua.a to SDK:Local/clib2/lib Copy src/#?.(h|hpp) SDK:Local/common/include HISTORY ======= 5.1-2 - updated to SDK 51.22 - updated to use clib2 1.200 - updated readme 5.1-1 - ported to AmigaOS using standard build system (use gmake) - added preliminary dynamic library support - not publically released 5.0.2 - ported to AmigaOS with custom Makefile et al