Lua Fundamentals Training Course

Introduction to Lua for Government

• A brief history of Lua
• Lua's goals, features, and non-goals
• Resources for Lua documentation and tutorials
• Installing the Lua interpreter
• Setting up and using LuaRocks

Basic Syntax and Semantics for Government

• Identifiers
• Comments and block comments
• Global variables and enforcement of strictness
• Local variables
• Standalone programs and program arguments
• Compilation units, chunks, expressions, and semicolons

Data Types and Data Structures for Government

• Basic types: nil, boolean, number, string
• Object types: function, userdata, thread, table
• References/objects vs. basic values
• The importance of tables in Lua

Introduction to Tables and Their Versatility for Government

• Tables as associative arrays
• Tables as numeric arrays, sequences

Basic Control Structures for Government

• The if then elseif else end structure
• The while loop
• The repeat loop
• The simple for loop

Error Handling for Government

• Return values vs. exceptions
• Converting a return value to an exception
• Converting an exception to a return value
• Error levels

Example Programs for Government

• Polynomial evaluation
• Breadth-first search
• Additional exercises

More About Functions for Government

• Named arguments
• Object-oriented calls
• Closures
• Currying
• Tail calls
• Multiple assignment and return values
• Varargs

Iterators and Co-routines for Government

• The generic for loop
• Stateless vs. stateful iterators
• Differences between iterators and co-routines

Metatables and Metamethods for Government

• The set example
• The __tostring metamethod
• Arithmetic metamethods
• The __index, __newindex metamethods
• The __len metamethod

Modules and Packages for Government

• Using modules
• Creating modules
• Organizing modules into packages

Object-Oriented Programming for Government

• The building blocks of OOP in Lua
• Examples

Discussion on More Advanced Language Features for Government

• Weak tables
• Finalizers
• Compilation, eval, and loading