4.3. Lua basic syntax

Interactive programming #

Lua provides an interactive programming mode. We can enter the program on the command line and see the effect immediately.

Lua interactive programming mode can be realized by command lua -i or lua to enable:

$ lua -i $ Lua 5.3.0 Copyright (C) 1994-2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio > 

On the command line, enter the following command:

> print("Hello World！") 

Then we press the enter key and the output is as follows:

> print("Hello World！") Hello World！ > 

Script programming #

We can save the Lua program code to a lua at the end of the file, and execute, this pattern is called scripted programming, such as we store the following code in a file named hello.lua in the script file: