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Lua Quick Start Guide

Lua Quick Start Guide

By : Gabor Szauer
3.6 (8)
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Lua Quick Start Guide

Lua Quick Start Guide

3.6 (8)
By: Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

Lua is a small, powerful and extendable scripting/programming language that can be used for learning to program, and writing games and applications, or as an embedded scripting language. There are many popular commercial projects that allow you to modify or extend them through Lua scripting, and this book will get you ready for that. This book is the easiest way to learn Lua. It introduces you to the basics of Lua and helps you to understand the problems it solves. You will work with the basic language features, the libraries Lua provides, and powerful topics such as object-oriented programming. Every aspect of programming in Lua, variables, data types, functions, tables, arrays and objects, is covered in sufficient detail for you to get started. You will also find out about Lua's module system and how to interface with the operating system. After reading this book, you will be ready to use Lua as a programming language to write code that can interface with the operating system, automate tasks, make playable games, and much more. This book is a solid starting point for those who want to learn Lua in order to move onto other technologies such as Love2D or Roblox. A quick start guide is a focused, shorter title that provides a faster paced introduction to a technology. It is designed for people who don't need all the details at this point in their learning curve. This presentation has been streamlined to concentrate on the things you really need to know.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
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Calling C functions from Lua

Because functions in C and Lua work so differently, exposing a C function to Lua can get a bit tricky. All C functions that Lua can call must follow the signature of lua_CFunction, which is defined in lua.h as the following:

typedef int (*lua_CFunction) (lua_State *L);

This function takes only one argument, the lua_State. The return value of the function is an integer. This integer is the number of elements that the function pushed onto the stack as return values.

Lua has multiple stacks—each C function called from Lua has its own stack and does not share the global stack.

Let's take for example a simple C function that returns the magnitude of a three-dimensional vector. In C, the code for doing so might look something like the following:

double Vec3Magnitude(double x, double y, double z) {
double dot = x * x + y * y + z * z;
if...
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Lua Quick Start Guide
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