A long needed post about Lua
Lua is a scripting language created in Brazil, more specifically in the (Pontifícia Universidaded Católica do Rio, PUC-RIO).
Quoting their own website: “Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.” Which is pretty accurate in my opinion, and probably in the opinion of everyone that works with it in a daily basis.
More importantly though, is that Lua is widely used as a scripting language in games. A lot of major companies use it, and a lot of well known games have published games using LUA. I worked in Fable 2 which is one of them, and I carry on working with it in Fable 3.
Two very important features of Lua in my opinion are the flexible variables, a Lua variable can take anything, integers, floats, strings, tables, enums, and their type can change on the fly so
if a == 1 then
a = ”I changed the variable to contain this string”
end
is perfectly valid.
The other one, and probably the most important feature of Lua are tables. Tables are a way of storing data, much like an Array, but a lot more powerful.
Tables are a sequence of Lua variables, so each entry of the table can contain a different type, and even other tables. And this is just amazing. After you used Lua tables you start wondering why the hell no other language has a feature like this.
I use C# for my XNA personal projects, and I was thinking about implementing a Lua style tables into it just because I miss it so much when I’m using C#.
Of course, these are just a couple of cool things about Lua, there are a ton more.
You can Download Lua here.
Old Path Constraint | Hulshof | 
September 5, 2009 2:25 am
3 Comments
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By Zach Aikman, November 11, 2009 @ 11:31 pm
I'm just curious, did you ever manage to get this working? I'm stumbling onto the same problem myself for a side-project I'm working on involving Lua, C# and named pipes for some inter-process communication. Having some sort of Lua table equivalent in C# land would make some things *so* much easier.
By Hulshof, November 25, 2009 @ 10:33 am
I never actually started writing the class, but it's certainly on my list of to do things when I get time