These notes should be read as an emendation to parts
of the Lua manual. The differences
arise from two sources: changes to the Lua interpreter and
to the use of a prelude which is executed before
anything else.
Lexical changes
Hard spaces in the source are interpreted as blank spaces.
Variable names may contain the characters $,!,?,@ and `.
The symbol '\' may be used instead of 'function'. The symbol
'=>' may be used instead of 'return'.
Syntactic changes
Local variables can be initialised from table values.
local x, y, ... in table_expr
is equivalent to
local t = table_expr
local x, y, .. . = t.x, t.y, ...
Binary operators +, -, *, /, ^, %, |, &, ~, <<, >> followed
by = can be used to update their left hand operand. So
x & = y
is equivalent to
x = x & y
Vicente's No Floating-Point Option patch has been applied to the Lua sources. The type
function altered to show int32 instead of number.
In the prelude
Format strings may be used as functions.
The variables $0, ... , $9 are defined. The type function
is redefined. The metatable of the imath library is given a key
Differences from Standard Lua