Lua
From codeTank
The following is copied from http://www.lua.org/about.html
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What is Lua?
Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.
Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
'Lua' means 'moon' in Portuguese and is pronounced LOO-ah.
Why choose Lua?
- Lua is a proven and robust language
Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom), with an emphasis on embedded systems and games. Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and there are several books about it. Several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993.
- Lua is fast
Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. A substantial fraction of large applications have been written in Lua.
- Lua is portable
Lua is distributed in a small package and builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have an ANSI/ISO C compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows, and also on mobile devices (such as handheld computers and cell phones that use BREW, Symbian, Pocket PC, etc.) and embedded microprocessors (such as ARM and Rabbit) for applications like Lego MindStorms.
- Lua is embeddable
Lua is a fast language engine with small footprint that you can embed easily into your application. Lua has a simple and well documented API that allows strong integration with code written in other languages. It is easy to extend Lua with libraries written in other languages. It is also easy to extend programs written in other languages with Lua. Lua has been used to extend programs written not only in C and C++, but also in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, and even in other scripting languages, such as Perl and Ruby.
- Lua is simple and powerful
A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways.
- Lua is free
Lua is free software, distributed under a liberal license (the well-known MIT license). It can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at absolutely no cost. Just download it and use it.
For specific reasons why Lua is a good choice also for constrained devices like cell phones, read this summary by Mike Pall.
Where does Lua come from?
Lua is designed and implemented by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua was born and raised at Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is now housed at Lablua. Both Tecgraf and Lablua are laboratories of the Department of Computer Science of PUC-Rio.
