Lua (pronounced __LOO-ah__, which means *Moon* in Portuguese) is a simple yet powerful, lightweight, fast, portable and embeddable scripting language. It is designed, implemented, and maintained by a [team](https://www.lua.org/authors.html) at [PUC-Rio](https://www.puc-rio.br/) and is housed at [LabLua](http://www.lua.inf.puc-rio.br/).

Lua supports procedural, object-oriented, functional, data-driven programming and data description. It combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting and rapid prototyping.

Lua has been used in [many industrial applications](https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used#8S4UcLlroV5fq8i3WSheIA) with an emphasis on embedded systems and games.

The home page for Lua is [Lua.org](https://www.lua.org/). Enjoy!

(Taken from https://www.lua.org/about.html)