lua icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
lua copied to clipboard

Unofficial mirror of the Lua history from 1.0 onwards (from releases, and intermediates when available)

README for Lua 5.1

See INSTALL for installation instructions. See HISTORY for a summary of changes since the last released version.

  • What is Lua?

    Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua is free software.

    For complete information, visit Lua's web site at http://www.lua.org/ . For an executive summary, see http://www.lua.org/about.html .

    Lua has been used in many different projects around the world. For a short list, see http://www.lua.org/uses.html .

  • Availability

    Lua is freely available for both academic and commercial purposes. See COPYRIGHT and http://www.lua.org/license.html for details. Lua can be downloaded at http://www.lua.org/download.html .

  • Installation

    Lua is implemented in pure ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms that have an ANSI C compiler. In most Unix-like platforms, simply do "make" with a suitable target. See INSTALL for detailed instructions.

  • Origin

    Lua is developed at Lua.org, a laboratory of the Department of Computer Science of PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil). For more information about the authors, see http://www.lua.org/authors.html .

(end of README)