Lua for RISC OS

Lua evolved from a data-entry language devised for PETROBRAS, the Brazilian oil company in the early 1990s. Its keynote has been simplicity. The current version is Lua 5.1. The term refers to a C library and to a programming language which the library implements. Both aspects have been designed for portability, extendibility and embeddability

Here are some useful links about Lua:

Usually boasts of portability mean portability to various styles of Unix, Windows and perhaps MacOS. For Lua it means a lot more. In particular it is portable to RISC OS.

There are two separate packages you can download from this site.

RiscLua is a modification of standard Lua, with enhancements to make it possible to write wimp programs with it. It comes as an application !lua. The directory !lua.bin contains two binaries: lua a RiscLua interpreter, and luac a compiler to bytecode for RiscLua.

Sources are in a form ready for compilation with the Norcroft C compiler.

What can these mean?

NB
!Luna is now incorporated into RiscLua. Luna scripts for StrongED should be converted as follows

• In the first line change

  #! luna
  

  to

  #! lua
  
  

• If the variable text is used in the script it now needs to be defined. You can do this by inserting the line

  
  io.input(arg[1]);text = io.read "*all";io.input()
  

  before its first use.