The latest version of scripting language Lua has been released with a number of new features.

Lua is a scripting language used in industrial applications such as robotics, image processing, text editors and web development. It was created in Brazil and was designed to be simple, small, portable, fast, and easily embedded into applications.  

As we reported in December, 2011 when the previous version was released, the name Lua means "moon" in Portuguese. The language supports functions as first class objects, closure and extensible semantics. It also isn't a class based language. Overall it most resembles JavaScript of all the currently popular languages.

The new version of Lua adds support for integers, bitwise operators, and the support for 32-bit numbers is now officially included. The new version also adds basic UTF-8 support, and now has functions to pack and unpack values. The UTF-8 support does not provide any support for Unicode other than the handling of the encoding. Any operation that needs the meaning of a character, such as character classification, is outside its scope.

The bitwise operators supported are bitwise and, or, exclusive or, right shift, left shift, and unary bitwise not. All bitwise operations convert its operands to integers, operate on all bits of those integers, and produce an integer result.

The language now has several new functions, including a number of string functions (pack, unpack, and packsize). There’s also a new move table function.

There’s a new simpler API for continuation functions in C, and a number of new functions in the C API including lua_geti and lua_seti, lua_numbertointeger and lua_stringtonumber, and lua_rotate.

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