Turning an entire script into a coroutine

[Michael Abbott <mabster@...>]

I'm fairly new to both Lua the language and the C-API, so please bear 
with me.  I also hope this hasn't been asked to often, I've done 
searches through the archives and come across similar information but 
nothing that really solves my particular situation.

I have a number of entities in a game I'm working on and I want to bind 
a lua script to each entity that will be used to describe it's 
behaviour.  I want to do this with coroutines so that each entity can 
yield once it has done it's current bit of the update.  There appeared 
to be some functions called lua_cobegin(), etc. that helped implement 
coroutines from the C end in the lua 4 days, but I can't find it in the 
version I'm using (5.0.2) so I assume it's deprecated.

I want to implement something that looks like this:

   -- various state functions will go in this section
   function player_idle()
       while true do
           yield();
       end
   end

   -- initialisation code and the call to the first state will go here
   player_idle();

This doesn't appear possible by what I can tell because the yield() 
would need to know what coroutine this script is in relation to (a 
script is not a coroutine right?).  Please tell me I'm wrong because I'm 
not proud of the next solution I started implementing.  So I ended up 
doing something like this:

   function player_idle()
       while true do
           coroutine.yield(1)
       end
   end

   return coroutine.wrap(player_idle)

From the C-side of things, I lua_open(), luaopen_base() (to get the 
coroutines).  I then luaL_loadfile() the script.  I then call 
lua_call().  I assume this now creates a global player_idle function and 
then returns a new coroutine.  From the C side of things I now have a 
number on the stack, but I'm not sure what to do with that number?  
Where do I go from here?

Thanks in advance,
- Mab


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