Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Computer Graphics Technology Group (TeCGraf). Generally, funding for university research is
provided by industry, which also expects solutions to some problems that they face. Petrobas, a
Brazilian oil company, one of the clients this group was helping them resolve issues related to data
entry. Operations of a petroleum company are large, and a large number of data transactions were
to be processed on a daily basis. They approached the group to devise a graphical front end that
would help eliminate errors in data entry, especially when working with legacy code from fixed-format
files.
TeCGraf looked at the whole series of screens that were provided to them and tried to find some
form of uniformity to help find a solution. For this they came up with a simple and unified data entry
language (DEL), which was used to describe the data in each data entry task. I think a good parallel
would be that of XML, but without the multitude of tags that make it confusing to understand. That
Sol
also means
sun
in Portuguese.)
than that of an IDE-type application. The API was implemented as a C library and linked to the
main program. Each type could have a callback function that functioned as the constructor (i.e., the
function is called when an object of a particular type is created). In 1993, the creators realized that
DEL and SOL could both be combined into a single more powerful language. This led to a proper
programming language that would have it all: assignment, control structures, subroutines, functions,
and so on. However, it would also work with the basic requirement to be able to offer data-description
facilities like those of DEL or SOL. They wanted it to be an easy-to-use language without cryptic syntax
and semantics, as the end users weren't expected to be professional programmers. Lastly, they
wanted it to be portable to run on any and every platform (if required).
Because it was a modified version of SOL, the creators called this new program
Lua
(which mean
moon in Portuguese).
Lua Timeline
As of this writing, Lua is in version 5.2.1. It has undergone quite a few changes and has been used
extensively in many projects for enterprise, entertainment, games, and apps. For many of us, it might
come as a surprise that Lua is used in South American homes practically on a daily basis. It powers
their interactive televisions. Universities use Lua in their research to allow for quick processing and
results.
In 1996, Lua got exposure internationally after an article in
Dr. Dobbs
. Following the article, there
were e-mails from developers. In a paper, Roberto narrates about how Bret Mogilefsky, who was
