[ANNOUNCE] Lua 5.0 (alpha) now available

[Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@...>]

Lua 5.0 (alpha) is now available for downloading at
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.0-alpha.tar.gz
	ftp://ftp.lua.org/lua-5.0-alpha.tar.gz
The mirror sites will be updated automatically by their own robots soon.

For the record, Lua is freely available for both academic and commercial
purposes under the terms of the MIT license: http://www.lua.org/license.html .

Note that this is an *alpha* release, not a work release. This means that
Lua 5.0 final is expected to be very close to it, unless serious flaws are
found. Small improvements are expected, specially in the implementation, but
no visible changes to programmers. In particular, if you're interested, you can
start porting your programs now; we don't expect to introduce incompatibilities
in Lua 5.0 final.

The tarball contains complete documentation in HTML, including an updated
reference manual and a new logo to celebrate recent sport events :-).
Printable versions of the manual in PS and PDF are available at
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/refman-5.0-alpha.ps.gz
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/refman-5.0-alpha.pdf
and soon at the mirror sites.

Please take some time to read the manual, as this is a major new release.
The manual still needs work: it is incomplete in parts but hopefully
it does not says false things.

Here is a brief summary of the changes (see HISTORY for a complete list):

  + lexical scoping.
  + Lua coroutines and support for external multithreading and coroutines.
  + standard libraries now packaged in tables.
  + tags replaced by metatables and tag methods replaced by metamethods.
  + each function can have its own global table, which can be shared.
  + new boolean type.
  + introduced lightweight userdata.
  + proper tail calls.
  + new, faster, register-based virtual machine.
  + support to user extensions in lua.c.
  + safe garbage-collector metamethods.
  + new error handling protocol.
  and much more...

Please report any problems to lua@tecgraf.puc-rio.br.

Enjoy.
--lhf