A rainy day week experiment to see what Lua syntax would be like with:

• Local variables by default
• An array type
• 0-based indexing
• Integer 0 is false
• Tables can store nil
• New tables' metatable defaults to table
• Assignment is an expression (returns value)
• Ternary operator (inline-if expression)
• Pattern syntax is PCRE
• String interpolation
• Stricter prototype-style inheritance
• Userdata are all light pointers
• Reference counting
• Concurrent cycle detection (heh!)
• Avoid use of longjmp

Don't think of LT as anything but an experiment. Bugs abound, and there's a heap of stuff not done (yet, or maybe ever...):

• No iterators
• No metamethods
• Standard libraries have big gaps or are missing entirely
• Only numeric for exists, and is limited to a simple 1+ counter
• Not (easily) embeddable

function hello ()
  text = "hello world"
  print(text)
end

hello()
print(text) -- error

Global variables are writable via a global table:

function hello ()
  global.text = "hello world"
  print(text)
end

hello()
print(text) -- success

Dynamic arrays (tuple, vector, etc) passed by reference.

stuff = [1,2,3]

for i in #stuff do
  print(stuff[i])
end

stuff[#stuff] = 4

The [] notation plays funny with Lua [[...]] strings. To nest array literals, add spaces.

Lua's 1-based indexing only seemed a bother when interacting with other stuff in the C-derived ecosystem, but there's a lot of that around. This affects the array type and strings.

Lua treats only nil and false as false. LT adds 0 to the mix.

stuff = { a = 1, b = nil }
print(stuff)

{a: 1, b: nil}

Obviously this means LT can't delete table items by setting them to nil, as Lua does. Still thinking about this...

while line = io.read() do
  print(line)
end

print(if true then "yes" else "no" end)

Stricter because it currently omits a bunch of cool stuff one can do with Lua's metatables and metamethods. Below, inherit is the equivalent of calling setmetatable and setting __index.

a = {
  alpha = function ()
    print("alpha!")
  end
}

b = inherit(a, {
  beta = function ()
    print("beta!")
  end
})

b.alpha()