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The Lua programming language is a bytecode interpreted glue language designed with extensible semantics as a primary goal. It is quite similar to Python in its simplicity, but it is considerably lighter. For example, while it is quite easy to use Lua to write programs in an object oriented style, there is no built in support for the paradigm, and the programmer has to extend the language to include object-oriented semantics.
An interesting feature of Lua is that it has only one data structure, the table. Tables can be used as arrays, hashtables or structures with named fields, and can also simulate namespaces. There is a similar level of simplicity in the atomic datatypes -- all arithmetic is done in double-precision floating point, for example.
Lua is fast compared to most other bytecode interpreted scripting languages, and is suitable for writing stand-alone applications (although there are nowhere near as many libraries available as there are for Perl, Python or Tcl). However, like Tcl, Lua was designed primarily as an extension language which could be linked into C applications and used to extend their functionality by nonprogrammers. It is released under a non-copyleft liscence, and has been used in many commerical applications (e.g. in Lucas Arts' Escape from Monkey Island adventure game).
Todo: add some code examples...
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