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An opaque structure that points to a thread and indirectly (through the thread) to the whole state of a Lua interpreter. The Lua library is fully reentrant: it has no global variables. All information about a state is accessible through this structure.

Synonym for lua_State *. See lua_State.

Synonym for lua_Alloc. See lua_Alloc.

The reader function used by lua_load. Every time it needs another piece of the chunk, lua_load calls the reader, passing along its data parameter. The reader must return a pointer to a block of memory with a new piece of the chunk and set size to the block size. The block must exist until the reader function is called again. To signal the end of the chunk, the reader must return NULL or set size to zero. The reader function may return pieces of any size greater than zero.

See lua_Reader.

Synonym for lua_Writer. See lua_Writer.

Type for C functions.

In order to communicate properly with Lua, a C function must use the following protocol, which defines the way parameters and results are passed: a C function receives its arguments from Lua in its stack in direct order (the first argument is pushed first). So, when the function starts, gettop returns the number of arguments received by the function. The first argument (if any) is at index 1 and its last argument is at index gettop. To return values to Lua, a C function just pushes them onto the stack, in direct order (the first result is pushed first), and returns the number of results. Any other value in the stack below the results will be properly discarded by Lua. Like a Lua function, a C function called by Lua can also return many results.

See lua_CFunction.

The type of integers in Lua.

By default this type is Int64, but that can be changed to different values in lua. (See LUA_INT_TYPE in luaconf.h.)

See lua_Integer.

The type of floats in Lua.

By default this type is Double, but that can be changed in Lua to a single float or a long double. (See LUA_FLOAT_TYPE in luaconf.h.)

See lua_Number.

Enumeration used as type tag. See lua_type.

Convert number to lua type.

Convert Lua type to its C representation.

Lua comparison operations.

Convert relation operator to its C representation.

Lua status values.

Convert C integer constant to LuaStatus.

Enumeration used by gc function.

A stack index

The number of arguments expected a function.

The number of results returned by a function call.