[ANNOUNCE] Lua 5.0 (beta) now available

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

Lua 5.0 (beta) is now available for downloading at
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.0-beta.tar.gz
	ftp://ftp.lua.org/lua-5.0-beta.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 *beta* release, not a work or alpha release. This means
that Lua 5.0 final is expected to be *identical* to it, unless serious flaws
are found. You can start porting your programs now; no incompatibilities are
expected to be introduced in Lua 5.0 final.

The tarball contains complete documentation in HTML, including an updated
reference manual. Printable versions of the manual are available at
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/refman-5.0-beta.ps.gz
	http://www.lua.org/ftp/refman-5.0-beta.pdf
and soon at the mirror sites.

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.

If all goes well, we expect to release Lua 5.0 (final) by the end of January.

Enjoy.
--lhf