Lua oop?

[Ando Sonenblick <ando@...>]

Title: Lua oop?

Gang,

I’m developing an animation engine that will have user level scripting implemented in lua (I’ll be embedding lua into my c++ app).  I’m perusing tons of websites, reading up on the lua.org documentation and so on to learn lua, how to embed it, extend it, etc..  

One thing I am not finding any real info on is any object oriented programming aspects of lua.   As of now, I’m not needing inheritance, encapsulation, etc.  Well, instead of saying what I don’t need, why don’t I simply say what I do need, and hopefully someone can tell me if it’ll be possible:

In my C++ code I have, say, a widget class:

class Widget
{
    long    aValue;

public:

    void    SetValue(long v) { aValue = v; };
    long    GetValue(void) { return aValue; };

};

Now, I want to make this object available for manipulation in a lua script.  So say the script is something like this:

function main(widget)            -- I need first to be able to pass things to a function (but I believe that the stack calls allow this easily enuf)

    widget:SetValue(10);         -- important to get the “:” operator to bind an object reference to a method
    print(widget:GetValue());   -- displays 10

end

So, that’s my initial prime objective: having lua access my C/C++ objects in a clean OOP syntactic way.    I’ve seen some things like tolua and other C++ wrappers, but I’m looking for info on how they do what they do, not just getting a tool to do it.

So, can anyone give me some pointers here?

Thanks much,
Ando
-----------------
SpriTec Software
www.spritec.com