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The Lua (pronouced LOO-ah or /lua/ in SAMPA) programming language is a lightweight imperative/ procedural language, designed as glue language with extensible semantics as a primary goal. The name derives from the Portuguese word for moon.

Lua was created by the Computer Graphics Technology Group of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1993. It is released as free software, versions before 5.0 were released under BSD-like license terms, which are non- copyleft. From version 5.0 Lua uses the MIT License.

Lua has been used in many commercial applications (e.g., in LucasArts' Escape from Monkey Island adventure gameThis is an article on the computer game subcategory. For the UK children's television series, please see The Adventure Game''. An adventure game is a type of computer game. The definition is very broad in scope, but fundamentally an adventure game can be and robot control software) as well as non-commercial applications (like AngbandAngband is a roguelike game derived from Moria and enhanced successively by Alex Cutler, Andy Astrand, Charles Swiger, Ben Harrison and Robert Ruehlmann. It is based on the writings of J. The adventurer is presented with 100 levels of the title dungeon, i and its variants). Its closest relative in the family of programming languages is perhaps the Icon programming languageIcon is a very-high level programming language featuring goal directed execution and excellent facilities for managing strings and textual patterns. it is related to SNOBOL, a string processing language. References The definitive work is The Icon Programm, although it could also be compared to PythonPython is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990, originally as a scripting language for Amoeba OS capable of making system calls. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme, Java and Ruby. Python is develo in its emphasis on ease of use for non-programmers.

Lua has a compact design, and this is evident from the fact that it supports only one data structurebinary tree, a simple type of branching linked data structure. In computer science, a data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Often a carefully chosen data structure will allow a more efficient algorithm t, the table. Tables can be used as arrayIn computer programming, an array also known as a vector or list, is one of the simplest data structures. Arrays hold a fixed number of equally-sized data elements, generally of the same data type. Individual elements are accessed by index using a consecus, setIn computer science, the set is a collection of certain values without any particular order. It corresponds with the mathematical concept of set, but with the restriction that it has to be finite. Disregarding sequence, it is the same as a list. A set cans, hashtables, lists or records, and can also simulate namespaces. There is a similar level of simplicity in Lua's atomic datatypes — all arithmetic is done in double-precision floating point, for example (although this can be changed to single precision floating point or integer arithmetic). The language's semantics can be extended by redefining certain built in operations on tables, and Lua also supports higher-order functions and garbage collection. It is possible to write object-oriented programs in Lua by combining all these features.

Lua programs are translated into bytecode and interpreted. Although Lua is usable as a stand-alone language, it is primarily designed to be used as an extension language or scripting language within programs written in C. In this respect, it is similar to Tcl. The Lua interpreter can be accessed through a small C library, which includes both the interpreter and an API for accessing its runtime state from a host C program. The API allows different parts of a program to be written in C and Lua and gives two-way access to variables and functions across the languages (i.e., a function in Lua can call a function in C, and vice versa).

Lua features prominently in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where the users have an unparalleled ability to customize many facets of the game, such as its user interface, character animation and world appearance, via Lua.