Page History: The LUA 5.1 Programming Language

Compare Page Revisions

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Current 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

« Older Revision - Back to Page History - Newer Revision »

Page Revision: 2007/09/06 14:39

Intro

WoW add-ons are developed using the LUA 5.1 programming language: LUA 5.1 Manual

Of course, the LUA language itself does not implement the WoW API, which uses an event-driven model, so simply reading the manual will not help you to write that killer add-on. But, you've got to crawl before you can run, so let's dive into some of the syntax features of LUA itself.

Reserved Keywords

A lot can be learned about a language just by knowing what words are reserved keywords (and thus, cannot be used as variable names).

and       break     do        else      elseif
end       false     for       function  if
in        local     nil       not       or
repeat    return    then      true      until   while

Arithmetic Operators

+  addition        1 + 2 => 3
-  substraction    2 - 1 => 1
*  multiplication  3 * 4 => 12
/  division        9 / 3 => 3
%  modulo          8 % 6 => 2
^  exponent        2 ^ 5 => 32

Relational Operators

== equality  
~= inequality
<  less-than
<= less-than or equal
>  greater-than
>= greater-than or equal

Logical Operators

false and nil are both considered false, everything else is true.

and  returns first argument if false/nil, otherwise returns second argument
or   returns the first argument if not false/nil, otherwise retuns the second argument.
not  returns true or false, depending on the argument

(work in progress)