Lua Programming: Syntax, Concepts, and Examples, 5th Edition, 2021

Despite being a fast and powerful programming language, Lua is very easy to use and learn. Programmers can easily embed this language into their applications. The basic purpose of Lua’s development was the creation of an embeddable lightweight scripting language that can be used in a variety of programming activities, such as web applications, image processing, and games.
History of Lua

A team of 3 members, namely Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) created Lua in year 1993 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. The two core foundation stones that led towards the development of Lua were the data configuration and description languages, namely data-entry language (DEL), and Simple Object Language (SOL). Between the years 1992 and 1993 teams at Tecgraf independently developed these two languages for two different projects. Both of these projects were developed at Petrobras Company and were graphical designing tools for engineering applications. However, SOL and DEL lacked flow control structures, and Petrobras realised that there was need to add a full programming feature to these languages. The design of Lua 1.0 was developed in a manner that enabled its object constructors, which were a little bit different from the present time light weight and flexible object constructors. The control structures’ syntax for Lua was taken from Modula to a great extent (as it consisted of the repeat/until, if, while loops). Part from that, the syntax was also influenced by a number of other languages, these included: CLU, C++, SNOBOL and AWK.