Lua 是一个小巧的脚本语言。作者是巴西人。该语言的设计目的是为了嵌入应用程序中，从而为应用程序提供灵活的扩展和定制功能。



Lua脚本可以很容易的被C/C++代码调用，也可以反过来调用C/C++的函数，这使得Lua在应用程序中可以被广泛应用。不仅仅作为扩展脚本，也可以作为普通的配置文件，代替XML,Ini等文件格式，并且更容易理解和维护。



Lua由标准C编写而成，代码简洁优美，几乎在所有操作系统和平台上都可以编译，运行。



一个完整的Lua解释器不过200k，在目前所有脚本引擎中，Lua的速度是最快的。这一切都决定了Lua是作为嵌入式脚本的最佳选择。-Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general procedural programming with data descr iption facilities. It also offers good support for object-oriented programming, functional programming, and data-driven programming. Lua is intended to be used as a powerful, lightweight, embeddable scr ipting language for any program that needs one. Lua is implemented as a library, written in clean C, the common subset of Standard C and C++.



Being an extension language, Lua has no notion of a　main　program: it only works embedded in a host client, called the embedding program or simply the host. The host program can invoke functions to　 a piece of Lua code, can write and read Lua variables, and can register C functions to be called by Lua code. Through the use of C functions, Lua can be augmented to cope with a wide range of different domains, thus creating customized programming languages sharing a syntactical fr a mework. The Lua distribution includes a sample host program ca