Newbie questions

["carol.hurwitz" <carol.hurwitz@...>]

I am working on a master's thesis in which I working with a group that 
has been developing tools that extend the lex/yacc (flex/bison) 
capabilities. One of those extensions is to handle significant 
whitespace, which appears in modern languages such as python and 
javascript  Lua falls into that category as it has optional semicolons, 
and thus newlines become significant.  I will be writing  flex/bison 
type files, adapted to our format.  The name of the project is 
Harmonia.[www.cs.berkeley.edu/~harmonia].  We are also working on 
handling embedded languages, and lua provides us with a good language 
for testing our tools.

At the moment I am looking at lua from a theoretical point of view, 
rather than as a programmer.  I have written almost no code.  I hope to 
introduce a junior/senior level course in my department with some game 
programming, at which time, I will have to have actually learned to 
program in lua.  But not until I finish this project!!

Questions:
1. What is the difference between chunk and block grammatically?   My 
understanding is that chunk is the start symbol and that you view a 
"program" as a chunk, not a block.  Within all the productions, only 
block is used, but since it is defined as a chunk, I don't really 
understand the intention or the precise meaning of the grammar.

2.  Somewhere it is stated that a #-line can be the first line in a 
chunk so that it can be run as a lua script.  The definition of block 
would mean that  you could have such statements sprinkled throughout the 
the code, i.e., wherever there is a block.  Is that what is intended?  
And is it used that way?

3. How do you do line continuation?  Do you use '\'?

4. Is there a nice little starter set of examples that I could look at?  
Other than what is in the manual?

Thank you.
Carol



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