Take a tour ! | LuaRT free and open source Windows programming framework for Lua

Take a tour !

A quick overview of Lua^rt

This is a brief introduction to Lua^rt that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to go through.
Make sure you have Lua^rt installed before beginning. (In case you have not done so, go to the Installation instructions before beginning)

Interactive REPL

As part of Lua^rt, there is an interactive console called Quick^rt, a REPL which stands for Read, Eval, Print and Loop. This is a Lua interpreter that waits for user input, evaluates the input, prints the result, and repeats the process over and over again. Using this interactive console during such sessions is a great way to learn the framework.

Quick^rt can be started using the Windows Start Menu (in the LuaRT submenu) or by typing quickrt into a console window (cmd.exe or Windows Terminal, for example). You can also double-click on it (Quick^rt is in the "\bin" folder inside the Lua^rt installation directory).

Quick^rt displays a blue triangle (the prompt) after a greeting message. This prompt indicates the interpreter is waiting for you to enter an expression or a statement.

Hello World !

Everyone knows that to become a programmer, or to learn a new programming language, one has to write a program to greet the world. Let's not break tradition, type "Hello World !" on the command prompt, and press ENTER :

The second line (in gray) is simply the interpreter's way of showing us the result of the previous expression it evaluated. As a result, the interpreter printed the string "Hello World".

In Lua, another more classic way to write "Hello World" is to use the global print function:

To write text to the terminal, standard Lua provides only the print function. There is a console module in Lua^rt that contains properties and functions which permit additional functionality. You will need to require for it first:

Now we're going to use the console.writecolor() function to write "Hello World" in color :

The first parameter of this function is the color, as a string, and the second parameter is a string that contains the text to be printed. Pretty easy !