elj Lua: elj Lua interface
Introduction
elj Lua (v 5.0) is an Eiffel interface to the Lua embeddable scripting language library.
Details
From http://www.lua.org/about.html ..
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.Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, interpreted from bytecodes, and has automatic memory management with garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
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. Extensible semantics is a distinguishing feature of Lua.
Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application. This means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that allows the application to exchange data with Lua programs and also to extend Lua with C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded as a language framework for building domain- specific languages.
Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. The result is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems too.
Documentation for the moment is limited to the source code:
- Eiffel code - http://cvs.sf.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/elj/elj-2002/lib/ifs/eiffel/lua/
- C code - http://cvs.sf.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/elj/elj-2002/lib/ifs/c/lua/
and some examples:
- simple - http://cvs.sf.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/elj/examples/ifs/lua/simple/
- callback - http://cvs.sf.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/elj/examples/ifs/lua/callback/
Note: lua lib/dll files:
For win32 users, Lua seems relatively tedious to install. A process has been developed for to generate static libraries (lua.lib and lualib.lib) for lcc-win32 .. the upcoming elj 0.8 release will provide geant scripts to automate the lua lib/dll process for commonly available win32 C/C++ compilers. In the meantime, please post a message to elj-users list or contact Geoff for lua install details.For Linux users, just install the lua library (v 5.0) and install .. it should work out of the box.
| elj Dependency Links |
| SmartEiffel (GNU Eiffel Compiler FAQ) - (beta bugs list news *) |
| ISE Eiffel (downloads) - (list cle faqs) |
| GOBO Project (lists: dev user commits cvs geant * gexace) |
| elj Mailing List: (elj-devel elj-users elj-commits) |