First impressions with Lua

I am not a big fan of arcane languages. When possible, I like to stick to mainstream languages. Sometimes, though, our work does drive us to some strange languages. Like Visual TCL, a toolkit for the SCO Unix operating system that I used in the final year of my BE degree.

I have mostly steered away from other popular languages such as Perl and Python. I started learning Lua when doing dissector development for Wireshark—quite skeptically at first, but I am fairly impressed by it.

I don’t want this post to be long, so I’ll quickly list those bits and pieces that are rarely seen in mainstream languages

• Arrays as tables of key/value pairs, or associative arrays

• Multiple return values from functions

• A generic for loop, which in combination with multiple return values from functions, leads to some pretty strange possibilities

• Named arguments to functions using tables

• Closures and the ability to redefine any function, allowing for convenient sandboxing