Things to remember when working with Lua

The following are concepts that you need to keep in mind when working with Lua.

Comments

A comment can be anything in between two hyphens and the next end of line:

   --This is a comment

Comment blocks are also supported. They are delimited by the characters --[[ and ]]:

   --[[
   This is a multi-line
   comment block.
   ]]

Dummy assignments

There are occasions where you don’t need all the information returned by a function, and in Lua, you can use dummy assignments to discard a return value. The operator is _ (underscore):

   local _, _, item = string.find(<string>, <pattern with capture>)

Indexes

Indexes start at one, not zero:

   z={"a","b","c"}
   z[1]="b" --This assignment will change the content of the table to    
   {"b","b","c"}

However, you can initialize an array at any value:

   nmap = {}
   for x=-1337, 0 do
     nmap[x] = 1
   end

Note

Keep in mind that all Lua libraries will stick to this convention.

 

 

Semantics

Due to its flexibility...